Carry On My Fairy Princess?
by Kokoro-no-Kaji
Summary: What seems like a routine ghost-hunt in the midst of the Apocalypse takes a turn for the weird as the Winchesters uncover another layer to the mysterious Plan that God has laid out for His creations in a town plagued by bad mojo and come out more lost than ever, but are they truly lost or are they on a path they cannot see? STRONG HINTS OF DESTIEL canon-compatible, set post 5x18
1. A Busy Stretch of Nowhere

Hiya!

This is set immediately between 5x18 & 5x19, and it's fully Canon-compatible.

* * *

Fredericksburg Virginia had to be the biggest patch of nowhere one could ever hope to find in such close proximity to a major city. With Washington DC only 40 minutes north, in traffic, how Fredericksburg could possibly have remained such a backwater was something of its own mystery.

However, that was a mystery the Winchesters weren't particularly concerned about. Their job was figuring out why this sleepy little town was experiencing a rash of disappearances and bloody murders. And it was an _unprecedented_ rash to be sure, as the town went from a murder every few years to a murder every few weeks over night

Sitting in a diner on Caroline street, one of the only _five_ streets in 'downtown', Sam and Dean were going over the facts again, manila folders spread out across the table. The disappearances started in August, once every other month or so. The victims were all college students, attending the University of Mary Washington, and they'd all disappeared on a Friday night as they were walking out to their cars in the parking deck behind the main campus. There had been police alert boxes and emergency beacons every forty feet between the last student-use building and the garage, but not once had any of the alarms gone off. They'd been checked and rechecked; not one was faulty, a call for help simply wasn't made.

The murders had an entirely different M.O. and it was throwing the boys off. Typically there would be one thing, just one, that had some bad juju in it for a town this size. But it wasn't unheard of for there to be two separately manifesting vengeful spirits in a place, they were just usually places bigger than Fredericksburg.

The second spirit was haunting some building at the corner of Williams and Princess Anne, because that was where folks were last seen. Parts of their bodies turned up in the alleyways behind some of the shops that flanked the intersection. The murders didn't start until late February, but they were much more frequent than the campus disappearances. The problem for the Winchesters was choosing which to focus on first, the less frequent disappearances with possibly still-breathing victims to be saved, or the more frequent murder spree that could be ended even though there was no hope for the victims already slain.

"You're gonna want to start with Mercer Hall. I already know who's behind it and where the body is, and I'm pretty sure at least four of the missing people are still alive."

Sam and Dean jumped at the voice, her words cutting through their concentration easily. Looking up from their pile of papers in surprise, they found one of the college students standing at the edge of their table with a cup of coffee in her hand. She sat down next to Sam without so much as a glance to ask permission, and started sorting through the files on the table like she owned them.

"Um, who exactly are you?" Sam managed after a moment.

Dean was still staring at her with an expression between horror, outrage, suspicion and downright amusement. She was peering at him far too frequently to say she wasn't being creepy, but just sparsely enough not to be staring outright.

"I'm nosy." She shrugged and when on, "The name's Alice."

"You're not a Hunter though, right?" Sam's confusion melted into dismay as he finally connected the way Alice was looking at his brother with how Becky had been known to look at him. Alice was much more subtle about it, more focused on the job, but the underlying fan-girl-vibe was still apparent. "You read the books."

"Yep."

Dean cursed. "When we're done here, we're gonna go pummel that whiny little bitch."

"He'd know you were coming."

"Shut up," Dean returned, huffing in Alice's general direction because though he knew she was right, he wasn't about to admit he'd accepted it.

Sam refocused the discussion, "So what were you saying about Mercer Hall?"

"It's an old building behind Monroe," Alice informed them, plopping her own file down on the table as she materialized it from her messenger bag. "It's pretty much been closed up, but because of the renovations in Monroe it's being used as office space for staff. In the 1950's it was a hospital; pretty run of the mill except for a few experimental psychiatric physicians doing tests to see if they could cure alcoholism, or at least make hangovers go poof. Dr. Rick Snyder was the guy in charge of the program, and he was a rabid alcoholic. He did most of his procedures drunk and killed a lot of people because of it. He was the driving force to find a cure for hangovers and he used to snatch drunks off the street and take them down to his private office to administer tests that were almost always lethal, but they were usually drawn out affairs. I think he got off on it, half torture, half self-serving science. Anyway, most of the victims lasted a few months and he always like to keep at least four in different stages of the process all at once."

Sam looked at Dean with raised eyebrows. "Sounds legit."

"It is. I know how to research," Alice simpered. "And like I said, I'm nosy."

"I'll say you are," Dean grumbled. She was still not-quite-staring at him. "How'd you know we were gonna be here anyway?"

"Come on, hauntings like this? This obvious? I knew a Hunter team would show up eventually, and there's only three diners in this town," Alice explained. "I didn't know it would be _you_, but I knew it'd be somebody."  
Dean stared at her over the edge of the folder with Dr. Snyder's smug mug plastered inside. She was staring back, more or less openly now, with a mix of admiration, snark, and that ever-eerie fan-girlism.

He shrugged aside the shivery feeling Alice gave him and asked, "By why students? Why not the people who work there?"

"The staff are never drunk when they're within grabbing distance," Alice explained. "Students on this campus are pretty much smashed any day of the week as a general rule from 9pm on, but they only go towards the parking lot on Friday nights when they're heading home. They're the only ones that fit the pattern."

"Okay, so where's Snyder's body?"

"Cremated." Alice's expression in that moment was one of the creepiest things Dean had ever seen, and he'd seen a _lot_ of creepy things over the years. She was reacting to his sonuvabitch flash of emotion, which was ten times more vibrant than her imagination had ever painted it from reading and, knowing that it would be, she'd _had _to provoke him to make it at least once. "But his life was in his work, literally. He used to get so intense about his work that he'd get nosebleeds, and sometimes drops fell on the paperwork. His private files, blood and all, are in his private study in the Mercer basement."

"Wait a minute, how long have you known that?"

"About three months."

Dean glared at her, "Then why didn't you do anything about it? You've read the books, right? So why didn't you stage your own little 'salt and burn girls-night-out' and gank that bastard? He's taken two people and you could have stopped him!"

"Dean."

"No, Sam, he's sort of right," Alice admitted. "But I promise, it's not because I was waiting for you to show up! I swear, if I could have, I would have."

Sam, willing to concede benefit of the doubt, asked, "So why can't you?"

Embarrassed, Alice looked at her shoes. "I can't open the door."

"It's locked?"

"No. Well, it was, but I can pick locks, so that's not the problem. The hinges are rusty and the door's already heavy on its own . . . I just don't have enough mass to move it," she admitted, her voice going soft with shyness, or perhaps shame.

The brothers looked her over again, their eyes flicking over her figure simultaneously in quick appraisal. She was actually quite tiny. Not midget short or stick skinny, or anything so noticeable, just tiny; like she was built on a different scaling system. Dean looked briefly to Sam, thinking about the over-sized scale used to build him. Sasquatch wasn't disproportionate, he was just big. Alice was the same, just small.

Sam sighed. "Can you tell us where it is?"

Jumping at the chance to redeem herself, Alice said, "Of course! Tonight's Tuesday, so that end of campus should be deserted by six. We can be in and out by seven!"

"Whoa, wait. '_We'_? What makes you think you're coming, Thumbelina?" Dean was always terse, this time he might have been more aware of that fact than at others, but it didn't stop him. "These things don't typically go out quietly when you're tryin' to kill 'em."

Alice nodded. "I'll let you guys handle everything, but you'll need me to show you where you're going. Mercer was built by an army of rabid baboons or something; it's worse than the art building in terms of organization and none of the hallways go in straight lines. If you want to get to Snyder's office before next week, you need a guide who knows exactly where it is."

A short staring contest ensued between Dean and Alice, because Dean had watched too many people get hurt and Alice knew she was right but Dean had pretty eyes. It wasn't half as uncomfortable as Sam thought it would be, seeing the 'Becky-fan-girl-monster' thing turned on Dean for a change was actually pretty amusing.

Dean huffed. "Fine. Now what can you tell us about the murders?"

"Not as much as I could about Snyder."

"Do you have anything?" Sam wondered.

Alice smirked. "Of course, I have _something_. It's just not as much as I hoped I'd have by now. We'll need to get inside to figure out exactly who it is."

"Inside where?"

"The Fredericksburg Museum's secret atomic bomb shelter; well, not so much secret as forgotten," Alice replied cheerfully. "It was built in the 60's by white supremists, and there's three or four guys that could be our ghost." Another file materialized from her messenger bag. It was such a smoothe motion that, if Sam didn't know better he would have sworn it was a spell. Actually, he wasn't sure he _did_ know. "But's here's a list of our top suspects: Brad Patterson, Jackson Goode, and Frank Jacobs; all three top nuclear scientists working in DC and living down here in Fred with their little not-quite-Nazi families."

"The victim pool _is_ mostly minorities, but that doesn't explain all of them," Sam mentioned. "And those were only the ones from the period right after the trio died. Now, most of the victims are white women."

"Ah, but they're modern white women. By accounts of the 60's scientists, they're black-sympathizers . . . and 'whores' to boot. Have you seen the average skirt length in this town? For a place this tiny, without a single decent club, the people take the word 'downtown' _way_ to seriously," Alice reasoned.

Sam had to agree.

Dean shrugged. "It's not so bad."

"Misogynistic pig," Alice said with a grin of good humor.

Then her watch beeped and her humor slipped away. "Damn."

"What's wrong?" Sam asked quickly, his face wary with concern. Dean' s expression matched, darkening instantly as his mind raced to figure out what he needed to kill.

Alice paused in her sudden rush to get up as she noticed the Hunters following suit. "Oh, sorry. I guess I shouldn't swear about the small stuff, not when you guys . . . it's nothing really. I just forgot. It's already almost 4, and I'm late. I have this psych final in about twenty minutes and it's all the way back on campus and I wore heels today and- I'm gonna stop rambling now. Promise."

Relaxing immediately, Sam mentioned, "We can give you a ride."

"We can _what_?" Dean demanded.

Looking pointedly at his brother, Sam reminded, "For the intel you dug up, it's the least we can do."

Grumbling, Dean grabbed his coat and shuffled the folders off the table into a neat-ish pile he could push into Sam's hands. "Come on, Thumbelina," he barked, heading out the door. "But if those heels of yours hurt my baby's leather . . ."

Sam shrugged at Alice, who was caught between charging after Dean and standing there like a love-struck statue as she beamed delightedly at his back. Looking down at her from where he stood, Sam realized that Alice really was _tiny_. Even in heels as high as any hookers' that Dean had ever brought back, Alice still wasn't much more than a chin-span above eye level with Sam's elbow.

The pair chased Dean to the car when they realized that he might very well drive off without them. Alice spent the entire ride to Trinkle Hall marveling at the amazing interior, the roar of the engine, the pure majesty that was _the_ Impala.

Alice slipped out of the car at the building's back door. From shotgun, Sam waved to her. "See you back here right after class?"

"Hell no, I need better shoes if I'm going on a salt and burn. No matter how careful you two try to be, chances are I'm gonna have to run," Alice responded. Sam wanted to protest, but he could see sense in her words. "My dorm is just up that hill and across the little park thing, so I'll run there before we do this. It's just psych, so I'll be out by 6. Meet me back here at 6:15-ish? We'll get to Mercer by 6:30 at the latest."

"Sounds good," Sam affirmed. "Good luck on your test, kid."

Alice smiled at him. "Thanks, Sam, really, but for the record, I like just about any nickname you can give me better than 'kid'."

Laughing, Sam wondered briefly if Dean would have gotten the same response. Probably, from the way she'd said it. He waved her off and then turned to his brother. "Ready to go poking around for this forgotten bomb shelter?"

"You know me . . ."

Alice watched as the car drove off, reveling in her unexpected ten minutes before test-time as she waited for her friends to text back.

"That was really them, wasn't it? Sam and Dean . . . for _real._"

Alice turned around to meet Brittany's excited eyes, nodding furiously and barely managing to suppress a burst of fangirl screaming that would have drawn _way_ too much attention. "_Tell_ me you got pictures."

"Of _course_, I got pictures. Who do you take me for?"

"God?"

"Good answer."

"They're here about the Mercer hunt? And the bomb-shelter thing?"

Alice nodded, heading inside with Brittany. "Yep, they're gonna take care of Snyder tonight. And please tell me you've gotten those records from the cemeteries! Even if we don't know _who_ we've got to burn yet, at least we can know _where_ the options are buried."

"I got two of them," Brittany said, passing over a folder. "Still waiting on the third. You know, even though we did figure out the ghost part of the books were real, I never expected the rest of it to be . . . especially _them_."  
Alice nodded. "Yeah, I know what you mean. With the fact that Sam and Dean are real, like _really _real, it kinda kills my respect for Carver Edlund."

There was a pause. Then the two girls looked sideways at each other and burst out laughing. "Only we would be confronted by the dream-boats of our literal fantasy world . . . and comment on the diminished literary value of the stories they're from."

"Well, we are the cool kids," Alice agreed.

"You know when Hannah's getting in?"

"Yeah, _our_ Sam should be picking her up from the train station now," Alice said. "Julie, Winnie, and Miae are still downtown, shopping their adorable little hearts out."

Brittany nodded. "Good luck on psych?"

"Yeah, good luck on Linguistics."

Much less than an hour later, Alice was sitting in the main campus dining hall, her dress and heels ditched for Keds and jeans. Across the table from her was the friend that had introduced her to the _Supernatural_ series to begin with.

"You _lied_ to Sam and Dean?"

"I exaggerated."

Alice shrugged at Hannah's incredulousness. "And they believed you?"

"I'm the hallmark innocent little white girl. _Lilith's_ vessel was scarier than I am."

To her left, the Lady Sam laughed. "I don't know a thing about this book series y'all are talking about, but isn't Lilith that creepy little girl you posted on Tumblr a while back? Dude, she is _way_ scarier than you."

Alice laughed. "See what I mean?"

Hannah sighed. "You're sending me these pictures, you know that, right?"

"They should already be in your email," Alice returned.

"I love you."

"I know. Now, how about you go grab the others and fill them in on the change in our long-weekend plans," Alice suggested. "I've got to go meet Sam and Dean."

"I hate you."

"I know."

* * *

By the way,

This was written for a "SPN in your life" FF challenge on Tumblr, so this is a story with real folklore about the Fredericksburg Virginia area!

I'm using mainly for storage but comments are a writer's crack ^_~


	2. Business as Unusual

Alice was right where she said she'd be at 6:15 exactly. Dean still grumbled about her being late. "Let's just get this show on the road, alright?"

"Yessir. This way, we're going around back."

The Winchesters didn't ask why. They just grabbed their duffle bag of guns and followed Alice as she led them up a steep and narrow trail that followed a ridge behind the main line of campus buildings. Mercer Hall was just as creepy as one would expect a not-quite-abandoned hospital building to be. It wasn't quite dark yet, but the building was sheltered in a little copse of beech trees that gave the place an especially eerie and closed off feeling.

"Stay close," Alice whispered as they stepped past the entry way into the hall. Sam and Dean pulled out a shot gun each and edged after their collegiate guide with caution. They didn't think that Snyder would attack, but now that she was doing this for real Alice was scared and the boys could tell. She wasn't the only one the guns served as a comfort to, seeing her relax soothed the Winchesters a bit as well.

Within five minutes, they realized that Alice had been right. Mercer Hall was so chaotically structured that Sam began to wonder if it had actually been designed at all. It seemed much more likely that its rooms had just been shoved together at random. And then they found the door, a flat sheet of steel about the size of a small double door.

Looking quickly from the door to the girl who'd tried to open it, Sam and Dean instantly felt bad about their suspicions. "Well, Thumbelina, looks like this is where we leave you," Dean said, trying to cover for the fact that he'd been vaguely pissed at Alice since the diner.

"Don't I get a salt circle?"

"Yeah, here," Sam said, digging into the pack for one of their canisters.

He handed it to Alice and then set the pack down, looking to Dean. His brother was about as cheerful as he was, but Dean shrugged and went with Sam to slam his shoulder into the piece of metal. It gave more easily than they'd expected, but it was still at least ten times heavier than Alice was.

"You good?" Dean asked, looking back to Alice as he checked his gun again.

Alice nodded, trying not to seem shaky. "Peachy."

She waved the Winchesters off and sat down to wait, secure in her circle. Well, as secure as anyone could be amidst the creepy walls of an old hospital and the scraping sounds of file cabinets on concrete with nothing to guard you from the wrath of a possibly angry spirit but a thin line of sodium chloride. When the cursing started, and the shooting, and the fighting and thrashing and the burning and the screaming . . . Alice got a lot less calm.

Well used to dealing with panic, Alice pushed the feeling down and remained seated. Her salt circle stayed put. The ghost of Snyder appeared before her for a moment, trying to go after her when he realized that killing off Sam and Dean was a lost cause. Alice watched his soul burn away and disappear.

Sam was the first to appear at the door. "How ya doing?"

"I'm good, just sittin' here watching the fireworks," Alice replied with bravado.

From inside the study, Dean shouted, "How's Thumbelina?"

Sam grinned and shouted back, "She's fine."

"Ask her where Snyder kept the victims."

"I can hear you too, you know!"

"Then answer the damn question!"

"In the mortuary. He hid the not-quite-dead bodies where he should have been putting actual dead bodies," Alice explained.  
"What'd he do with _them_?"

"Burned them up out back. Actually, I think it was right around where the Nest is now . . ." Shivering slightly, Alice murmured to herself, "No wonder the food's funky there. I'm never eating anything on this campus again. Ick."

Sam puzzled over her comment for a moment, then he asked, "So where's the mortuary?"

"Follow me, gents, next stop, the human meat-market," Alice said, trying to cover the horrible picture invading her mind of her school's food with lame jokes.

The moment Alice stepped out of the salt circle, she was flung sideways. Not hard, but since she had so little mass to resist with, her shoes scuffed three feet to the side. It was a ghost, a nurse, that had launched herself at Alice out of the ether. "_Thank you,_" she whispered before fading into nothing.

Alice stood stunned for a moment.

"Well, that was . . . odd," Sam commented.

"Does that normally happen to you guys? 'Cause it's not in the books."

"No," Dean returned. "No, that decidedly does _not_ happen to us. What the _hell, _man?"

Sam looked just as baffled as the other two felt, but he's the one they had learned to look to for answers. "I don't know. We don't get thanked. By anyone."

Shrugging, Alice led the Winchesters long the narrow corridors to the _sub_-sub-basement, the out of the way room used at the mortuary in the early days of the hospital. "Here we are, the victims should be just through here," Alice said. It was another heavy door, one that Alice couldn't hope to open on her own. When she reached out for it, thinking that Sam and Dean were only a step behind her and would be able to take the brunt of its weight, she didn't expect it to burst open or to be snatched inside by a hand reaching out.

As the door slammed closed behind her, she heard Sam and Dean shouting for her but she was too preoccupied with the whole, omg-I'm-gonna-die thing to really fangirl over it. She couldn't scream either, staring down the ghost, another nurse from the looks of her, made Alice's lungs clamp down in her chest and all she could think about doing was shrinking away into nothing.

"_You freed us,_" the nurse screeched. "_You freed all of us. You can't just take it away now, you let us out."_

"Cas! Get your feathery ass down here!"

"_Don't let them take us."_

The ghost's voice faded out as she did, fizzling away into nothing.

The door banged open as Sam and Dean managed to push through it. They were on Alice in a heartbeat, asking to know what happened.

"She said I freed them . . . but I _swear,_ I've never done anything like work black magic, not once," Alice promised. "How could I have freed them?"

Dean was shouting again, "Cas? We could really use some answers right now."

"I'm sorry, Dean, but Castiel's busy."

Wheeling around to confront the woman with shoulder length black hair, who had simply appeared behind him, Dean demanded, "Busy? What do you mean, 'busy'? Tessa, what's going on here?"

"You're Tessa, you're a reaper," Alice connected, "You're the one 'taking' the ghosts."

"Yes, Alice. There are several reapers in the vicinity," Tessa said gently. "We're taking the lost souls home."

"Why didn't you take them when they died?" Sam wondered.

Tessa sighed, "The usual reasons."

"So why can you take them now?"

In response to Sam's question, Tessa gave Alice a sad smile. "You broke through their cycles, stopped one process and restarted another. It's as if they'd only just died again."

"How . . ."

"In due time, Alice," Tessa said gently. "Dean, your little angel will be at the Bell Tower as soon as he is able to be, his mission in Heaven is to gain you allies. It's not going very well, but it's not a lost cause."

Tessa paused, walking over to the refrigerated cabinets bodies were kept in. She touched two of them and Alice gasped to see the souls of people she'd known, or at least been vaguely familiar with from seeing them around campus, appear beside the reaper. Alice felt like puking, these were people she should have found a way to save. It was just a dumb door, and she'd let it stop her. And two people were dead because of it.

"Two of them are still alive," Tessa responded to Alice's unspoken, but obvious thought. Turning briefly to Dean, Tessa commanded, "Keep her safe, Dean. She's important."

"How?"

"I'm not your reaper, Sam, I don't have to answer you," Tessa responded.

And then the trio was alone in the mortuary, silent save for the muffled sounds of someone trying to call for help from one of the body cabinets. Sam and Dean helped the survivors out of their prisons. One was mostly unconscious, a girl from Alice's World Lit Class. The other was one she knew as well; Derek had been hammered, taking a shortcut by Mercer back to his place at Eagle Landing after a night out drinking with the party crowd of the music department in Pollard Hall. It had been a party Alice had gone to, one she should have known would end with someone going missing.

Derek was badly shaken from the experience and weak with blood loss and fatigue but he looked like he would recover completely. He'd only been taken a few days ago. Mentally, he might retain some trauma, but he'd only been grabbed a few days before and it was possible, likely even from the way he looked at Alice with such confusion, that he might chalk it up to a particularly nasty hangover.

The other victim, Claire, was mostly unconscious after just over a month being held captive and tortured. She would definitely need therapy. Alice tried not to think about it as she said, "Come on, the nearest hospital's this way." Sam was carrying Claire, and Dean had Derek's arm slung over his shoulder, just in case. Alice led them cautiously across the street and down the few blocks to Mary Washington Mercy Hospital.

Sam gave her his cell phone number, and instructions to call in the morning, as Dean helped Derek hold Claire. The Winchesters left the college trio at the hospital doors, being that they were still wanted men and any government establishment, especially this close to the Capitol, had been deemed unsafe for entry. The story was that Alice had found Derek and Claire while exploring Mercer. She got a tiny black mark for being in the building after hours, but mainly she was hailed as a hero and the Fredericksburg police set immediately to investigating the staff members with offices in the now entirely off-limits abandoned hospital.

After being questioned for what felt like hours, Alice made her way slowly back to her dorm. She'd almost forgotten about the fact that she'd invited friends over for the weekend and that her dorm was hardly the private space she would have liked it to be. It wasn't that she didn't love having her friends around, especially to share in the fangirling of a dream-come-true that was the Winchesters' existence. It was that it was just _so_ real, it was mentally exhausting to have fantasy made real and to be confronted with the cold and messy reality of the struggles between life and death . . . It was just a lot to take in.

Hiding her numbness from her friends, Alice feigned the need to shower before dinner and spent an hour letting the water pour over her and drown out her confusion. By the time she got back, and the pizzas had been delivered, she was back to having perfect control of herself, more than ready to dish the juicy details of the day. The slumber party actually involved sleep for most of the girls.

Julie was the first to fall, the quiet distractions of whispered stories and a movie no one was really watching weren't enough to keep her mind and body engaged and waking. Winnie followed her close behind, having been curled up next to her on Alice's bed as they let the movie run. Sam was on Alice's bed too, the only person who'd given a fair shot to actually watching the movie. The moment it was over she was out cold.

Hannah and Brittany were on Alice's ever-absent roommate's bed, opposite sides due to a mutual distaste for encroachment of personal space. They were cooing over the HD pics of the Winchesters Alice had touched up with her phone while waiting around at the hospital. Their conversation slowly shifted to the more serious side of things, Brittany and Hannah being the ones who knew best what Hell the whole _Supernatural_ thing could be, even when it wasn't real.

They didn't explicitly ask if Alice was okay, that wasn't how they did things. Alice would always tease Hannah about being even less chick-flicky than Dean. But they made their concern apparent by simply staring her down as they talked about other things.

"Get some sleep, okay?" Brittany said through a yawn as she curled up with the intent of not moving until morning.

Alice smiled cheerfully. "Of course!"

Eyeing her, Hannah added, "She meant before the sun rises."

"Yeah, yeah. Hey, I'm gonna go make some hot chocolate, you want any?"

"Sounds good. I'll get another movie loading, m'kay?"

"Fabulous."

Taking her time to make the hot chocolate, Alice wondered how long Hannah would be able to stay awake. Hopefully not too much longer; she'd been running around for classes half the day, and traveling down to Fredericksburg the other. Alice wanted to take a look downtown tonight, a walk in the night air to clear her head and a scouting mission for the next day's raid on the forgotten bomb shelter.

Preemptively attacking the drowsiness that hadn't hit her yet, Alice stirred a little espresso-in-a-can into her mug before returning to her room. She discovered that she needn't have bothered as Hannah was already passed out, slumped possessively over her laptop. Alice smiled and sipped at her hot chocolate as she carefully hit the power button to stop the screen from flickering against Hannah's closed eyes.

Then she slipped on her shoes and her jacket, jamming her headphones into her ears, and stepped out into the night.

Meanwhile, Sam and Dean had been trying to get a better lay of the land. They'd found the bell tower that Tessa had mentioned with ease, it was the single tallest building in town and it was on top of a hill to make it even more obnoxiously easy to find. They'd been sitting on the little park benches underneath it in shifts since they'd left Alice, Derek, and Claire at the hospital.

The on-campus Simpson Library was the only one in town and it closed at eleven to Sam's dismay. He'd still had another hour before it was his turn to be on Cas-watch, so he'd wandered out to the highway to pick up some food from a chain, finding slim pickings in the tiny town that all but shut down completely by nine. Dean welcomed the bag of hamburgers his brother delivered with a massive grin.

"I can't believe you're just okay with this," Sam mused as Dean dug to the bottom of the bag for the little packets of ketchup.

"What? Waitin' for Cas?" Dean asked. He seized his prize with an exclamation and set to work emptying a few packs onto his first burger as he said, "You need to relax, Sammy. Sit back and smell the cheap perfume." Sam didn't miss the way Dean's eyes admired the sway of a co-ed's hips beneath her short skirt as she marched away from them towards Downtown.

Sam rolled his eyes. "You're disgusting, you know that?"

"Hey, they're legal," Dean protested, taking a massive bite. Through the food he mumbled a qualifier, "Most of 'em."

"Hey man, I'm not just gonna sit here, waiting for _your_ prom date to show up, and listen to you pine after jailbait," Sam huffed.

"Then don't listen," Dean returned with a grin.

Sam just stared at him incredulously for a moment before giving up, grabbing a burger, and dropping down onto the bench across from his brother. Dean's triumphant smugness was muted by the food in his mouth as he asked, "So what did you find out about the town, 'cause I've got next to nothing on this mysterious bomb shelter. Nobody around town seems to have any idea where it is, or even if it actually exists."

Pulling his laptop out of his messenger bag, Sam tried not to let his irritation on the matter show as he said, "I haven't had much more luck. The library here closes at eleven."

"Seriously? I mean, isn't that a little early for a college?"

"The main one at Stanford _never_ actually closed, so, yeah, I'd say it's a little early."

"Did you get access to their databases?"

Sam grumbled, "Sort of. The wi-fi at this school is ridiculous, I think it's designed to keep hackers out, but it doesn't really make any sense. And then the university website itself is . . ."

"What, big nerdy _you_ can't find the information you want? That is messed up."

"It's not just messed up, it's insane. Take a look at this, honestly, how _anything _gets done with this sort of a set-up is beyond me," Sam complained, his frustration leaking through his almost-calm façade like oil through a strainer.

Dean took Sam's laptop and started tapping through the pages, looking for any bit of info that might prove useful. Within a few clicks, he couldn't even figure out how to get back to the home page. "What the hell is this? Some sort of fucking mind control thing, subliminal messaging crap?"

"I dunno, but if we're gonna find that bomb shelter before we find another body, we'll need Alice's help."

"Damn. That little fairy princess is gonna get herself killed."

"She knows she's not Hunter material, give her a break," Sam pushed. He knew his brother was only being mean because he couldn't bear to be caring, especially not about one of his fangirls. It was a lot like how Sam was with Becky, except with more legitimate concern. Becky was obnoxious and annoying, Alice was just sweet. And of course, there was the fact that Becky would probably live through a beating. Alice admitted to having significant trouble opening the normal doors on campus, not just the big rusty ones in basements.

Dean huffed, grabbing another burger and passing Sam back the laptop.

There was a moment of silence between them as Dean watched another skirt slink by and Sam wrestled in vain with the University's website. When Sam was a hair's breadth from slamming the laptop against the side of the bell tower, Dean asked, "Hey, does this place feel weird to you?"

"Weird? What kind of weird?"

"Like _weird _weird. Like Stepford weird."

Sam paused, thinking. "It is sort of oddly quiet." It wasn't all that strange, being shy of 2am on a Wednesday morning would theoretically call for quiet in a town this size. But considering that this was a college town, and with how Alice had described the drinking habits of the Mary Washington student body, it did seem strangely subdued.

"It's like 65 degrees out and I swear I've seen like twenty people wearing Northfaces," Dean confided. "It's fucking creepy."

Sam's eyebrows shot up. "Seriously? That is weird."

"I know, right? I just wish Cas would get his ass down here so we can get this figured out," Dean muttered, looking blankly in the direction of Downtown. "This place is giving me the heebie-jeebies." There might not be any good clubs in this town, but there had to be at least one bar open this late and Dean could really do with a beer right now.

"I would suggest that you hold off on the liquor until after we figure this town out, Dean. There's something here."

Dean jumped at the voice that suddenly took shape behind him, spinning around in his seat to meet Castiel's stony blue gaze. "Cas! What the hell man, we've been sitting here all night!"

"I've been in Heaven."

"Tessa told us," Sam mentioned. "But why didn't you just call us or something, why'd we have to wait here? I mean, normally you just pop up in our motel rooms."

"Yeah, why _did_ we have to wait here?"

"There is something here, Dean," Castiel reaffirmed stiffly. "Something powerful. It's interfering with my ability to move around."

"Wait a minute, 'something' is here?" Dean demanded. "Like a demon something?"

"I don't know. But whatever it is, it would be wise not to draw attention to ourselves until we have more information," Castiel informed him.

Sam was firmly in camp don't-piss-off-the-angel, because he'd rather have Castiel's help and suffer for it than have to take this thing on without any angel-mojo on their side. "Great, so what do we do?"

"We have to figure out what we're dealing with, whose side it's on."

"Do you think the angels might have something to do with this?"

"No demon has the power to disable me like this," Castiel replied. "Not on its own, at least. And no demon would be able to move freely in this vicinity either. Whatever this thing is, it's dangerous, and it's causing other things to be dangerous."

"What do you mean?" Sam asked, his interest piqued.

"I mean that whatever this thing is, it's making things happen, forcing all the powers of entities from both sides of this war, even bystanders, to manifest themselves on the human plane," Castiel explained vaguely, his usual sharp tone more biting than Sam remembered it.

Dean thought so too. "Geez Cas, who put that stick up your ass?"

Castiel's hard stare turned on Dean in its fullest power. "Heaven is at _war_, Dean, and all of my brothers and sisters, comrades that I _love_, are trying to kill me. They want whatever's here; I could feel their interest in it. But now I can hardly sense anything more than Jimmy's body can, it's a disturbing sensation. I believe the closest human comparison is that of induced drowning."

"You're telling me that there's something here with the juice to _water-board_ an angel?"

"I don't understand that reference, but this thing's 'juice' has the strength to do much more than merely ground me," Castiel reiterated.

Sam puzzled, "What sort of creature could have that kind of power?"

"I don't-"

"Sam?"

Sam's attention shifted instantly to where Alice's voice was coming from. She was walking down the hill from the main campus towards downtown and from her perspective Sam was the only one who could be seen. "Where's Dean?" she called curiously.

"I'm here, Thumbelina," Dean shouted, coming to stand by his brother.

He looked Alice over quickly. She'd changed out of her jeans into flannel pants and her hair was twisted up in a damp bun on top of her head. She looked fairly good, considering what had happened earlier. She wore a tight expression though, one that shot him through with worry for a moment until he realized that she wasn't alone.

Biking along beside her was the poster-boy for future customer of mom's-basement-real-estate. Alice wasn't the typical sort of pretty and popular girl, but anyone with eyes could tell that she was _way_ out of the little dork's league. "Who's your friend?" Dean asked, crossing his arms over his chest and fighting down a grin as Alice came within easy hearing distance.

She looked almost pained as she did the introduction. "Dean, this is . . . Danny. We've got a class together." Her eyes flicked from Dean to the much more sympathetic Sam, her expression screaming, _help me_ plain as day. "Danny . . . this is Sam and Dean. They're uh . . . friends from work."

Danny was looking Sam over, appraisingly, trying to judge him as competition in a way that made Sam fight to suppress a laugh. As if there was any universe in which _Sam Winchester_ might worry about this kid. Why Alice hadn't managed to kick him to the curb yet became easily apparent, he was delusional. Sam decided to help her out.

He stepped forward and swept her into a bear hug. Pretending to tease her, he asked, "Just friends now, are we?" He let his stare bore into Danny's eyes from over Alice's shoulder after he gave her a kiss on the cheek, and he kept a possessive hold on her shoulder once he let her down. Looking to Danny, he added, "Alice hasn't really mentioned you, what class do you have with her?"

"Philosophy," Danny squeaked, not realizing how pathetic he sounded when trying to stand up to someone who could snap him like a twig without batting an eye.  
"Ah."

Sam stared Danny down for a few very uncomfortable seconds before Sam said, "We'll let you get to your evening, then. Alice, I think Dean's going to eat all our food." He then practically picked Alice up as he turned around to join Dean and Castiel on the other side of the tower.

Danny hesitated a beat, but then he gave in and called farewell before pedaling off.

They waited until they couldn't see him anymore, and then the three humans burst out laughing. "You seriously just saved my life," Alice panted through her glee.

"I don't see how that small man was life-threatening," Castiel puzzled, drawing Alice's attention to him for the first time. He'd been more or less hidden behind Dean throughout the confrontation with Danny.

"Castiel!" Alice chirped, delighted to see him. She laughed at what the situation must have looked like to him. "Trust me, Cas, Danny is not _dangerous_, but he's not good news either. Though I think Sam might have kissed me into decent odds of awaiting premature-death . . ."

"What?"

"Nothing, Sam, don't worry about it," Alice covered quickly. "I owe you _ten_ for that."

Grinning ear to ear as he thought over the expression on Danny's face, Sam replied, "Just tell us about this secret bomb shelter and we'll call it even."

Something rough in his voice told Alice all she needed to know. "You found my school's website. Catastrophically unhelpful, isn't it?"

Sam laughed. "At least I'm not the only one who's had to call it quits."

"Not by a long shot," Alice assured. "The web's info is pretty limited anyway. If you don't mind going now we can walk there in fifteen minutes."

A quick look between the brothers and Alice had the answer she was expecting.

* * *

A/N: FYI, updates will be put up once or twice a day, and the whole story will be up within a week!


	3. Alice Down the Supernatural Rabbit Hole

Alice could walk the route to Downtown backwards in the rain, high heels, and and a neon sign that read 'kick me' with more comfort than the trip she made with two brothers in town on business and an angel of the lord.

As she led them down the hill towards Princess Anne Street she noticed that Castiel was still scanning her with his intensely appraising stare. He was focusing on her so closely that he didn't notice that his shoulder brushed against Dean's now and then as they tramped down the hill. Alice was surprised that Dean didn't say anything about it, and more surprised that Sam didn't, but under the angel's unblinking gaze, she didn't have the nerve to say anything herself.

After the seventh time Alice had counted, and several more she was sure had occurred before she'd started counting, Dean finally said something, "Cas. Straight lines. Normal people walk in them?"

Castiel paused, looking puzzled, as if he really hadn't noticed. "I'm sorry, Dean. I'm just . . . distracted."

"Yeah, I noticed," Dean retorted. "What's up with you making eyes at Thumbelina? If I had thought angels would have a type, I wouldn't have expected yours to be college girls."

"What do you mean? I'm simply trying to discern what manner of creature Alice is," Castiel responded, as if it were obvious.

Alice, moderately affronted, jumped in, "Um, excuse me? _Creature?_"

Turning to face Alice and look her over again, Castiel said, "Yes. You are very nearly human, and with my senses dulled I cannot sense much of your internal energy. You are young but your soul is bright with experience, and you are not a child and yet you are so very compact; I do not believe I have encountered one of your kind before."

"Compact?" Alice's jaw twitched as she clenched her teeth together.

"Yes, extraordinarily so."

"_Compact_?"

Castiel looked to Dean in confusion. "Is there a meaning to that word I am unaware of?"

Dean had no answer, he was too busy trying not to laugh aloud and further insult the tiny firecracker of a girl who suddenly seemed a lot more dangerous than she had five minutes ago.  
The space of half a second passed with Castiel staring in earnest and hopeful confusion at Dean, Dean trying not to choke on the laughter he could no longer contain, Sam trying to get Castiel's attention to warn him of impending doom, and Alice trying not to throw a bitch-fit worthy of the PMS history books. And then Alice's hands were on the lapels of Castiel's trench coat and her knee was jabbing into his gut with ferocity that made up for her size twice over.

The attack didn't actually hurt the angel, but it took him by surprise and his vessel's lungs protested to the sudden winding without angel-mojo's instant recovery. He blinked up at Dean like a lost puppy someone had just kicked. Dean was howling with laughter and Sam sighed as he watched Alice storming off, muttering curses about 'those damn insensitive angels'. It only took a moment for Castiel to recover and Dean clapped him on the shoulder, using him as a crutch until he caught his breath as they followed after Alice. Presumably, even though Castiel had offended her, she was still leading them to the secret bomb shelter.

She was; it had only been a few streets farther into town. By the time she'd reached the small placard announcing the bomb shelter's existence in the basement of the Fredericksburg Museum, she'd cooled off from her rage reaction to Castiel's comment. The angel chose to step carefully around her anyway, still convinced that she wasn't quite human and wary of her reactions.

Sam examined the sign closely; it wasn't any sort of prank. From the early sixties, it had been securely attached to the museum's exterior and over the decades it had been weather warped so that the edges bit into the stone. It couldn't be removed now without the surrounding wall taking significant damage and it was such an unnoticeable feature that the average townie passing by would never have reason to note it. If Alice hadn't pointed it out, Sam wouldn't have noticed it either. Dean had walked right by it at least twice while he'd been in town earlier.

"Dean, lock pick," Sam asked, looking towards the doors of the Museum's side entrance.

Alice stopped him. "It's easier to get in through next door. The little souvenir shop doesn't have nearly as good locks as the museum, and they used to be part of the same building so their basements connect."

Sam looked to Dean who shrugged. Alice hadn't led them wrong yet. The younger Winchester followed Alice down to the next door and, sure enough, the lock on that door popped open in less than a minute. Navigating the gift shop was tricky in the dark, it was so cluttered and overfilled that Sam and Dean had trouble moving through narrow gaps. Castiel's coat caught on the edges of every table he passed and it was only due to Sam's insistent concern to disturb as little as possible that he didn't knock everything over without a second of consideration.

Alice meanwhile was waiting impatiently for them at the door to the shop's basement. Despite her irritation with her 'compact' existence, she managed to shoot him an audacious look that dared him to say anything about its usefulness. The angel looked like he might have taken her up on it, but Dean jumped in instead, "And the secret bomb shelter is?"

"Well, if you strapping fellows could just keep up . . . Come on, we're almost there," Alice replied, shoving the door out of the way.

The long passage leading down to the depths of Fredericksburg's underground was easier to navigate than the store above, both because there were no tables of tchotchkes to dance around and because Alice had flipped on the lights after they'd closed the access door. They must have descended three stories before Sam mentioned, "This place really goes down; they use this as a normal cellar?"

"No, while you guys were busy trying not to break everything I managed to pull off the paneling on the wall that hid the door," Alice explained. "I don't think anyone even knows this is here. I couldn't find much information on it, but the vague blueprints I found gave us a door, though they didn't show even half the rest of the picture."

"So what're we looking for? How do we know who to burn?" Dean asked.  
"I was hoping you guys would be able to tell me. I don't know what we're looking for, unless the dude shows himself directly," Alice replied.

Sam sensed the tremor in her voice. "We've got salt and iron. Always do. We wouldn't have let you come here with us if we didn't have _some_ precautions."  
"I do not believe that they will be necessary," Castiel mentioned, his eyes scanning the walls of the path to the bunker with the intensity of a crime scene detective on the case. "These halls are stained with blood, but from decades past; this is not the entrance the ghost, if that is what is causing these murders, is using."

"What do you mean?" Alice asked, her skin beginning to crawl.

Castiel paused, bringing the others to a stop as well. He stared directly at Alice as he said, "I do not believe that the ghosts are the only things you've freed in this town."

"I didn't free anything," Alice protested.

Sam hesitated, but he mentioned, "You said the ghost did _say_ you freed it."

"Cas, what does that mean? How could she have 'freed' these things?" Dean demanded.

"I'm not sure yet, but I am certain that whatever is happening in this town revolves around Alice," Castiel replied simply, his eyes still scanning the walls. "Give me your hand."

"What?" Alice didn't have time to protest. Castiel's request-that-sounded-like-a-command turned out to actually be a command as he grabbed her hand forcefully and began examining her palm. "What are you doing?"

"Dean, hand." Castiel didn't wait for Dean's consent either, snatching up his hand after dropping Alice's. She curled in on herself, but didn't take more than a step back as she watched Castiel upset Dean by more or less _fondling_ his hand.

Castiel kept a hold on Dean's hand as he brushed his own fingers against the smoothe concrete wall of the passageway, and then mimicked the action by dragging Dean's hand across the surface. The wall was cold and chalky with dust and disuse.

Yanking hard on his hand, Dean pulled out of Castiel's grasp and took the last few stairs in the passage to yet another heavy door before turning around and demanding, "What the _Hell_, man? Since when do you have a hand fetish?"

"It is not of import. We must continue this investigation and return Alice to her comfort zone as quickly as possible," Castiel replied, walking straight for Dean and reaching around him to force the door open with his typical angelic strength and disregard for property damage. The angel brushed past Dean and made his way into the bunker, trench coat swishing out behind him as he peered around at the interior.

Dean wasn't about to let him off the hook that easily. "No way. You're not just allowed to get all handsy with a wall, practically yank a girl's arm off, and then move on like nothing happened. What's going on, Cas?"

"Alice is a very special girl, Dean, very important. The sooner we get her away from here, the sooner we can subdue what is causing these disturbances."

"And that something would be? What? A ghost? A demon? Cas, we've got nothing but a ghost story and something with enough magical-microwaves to short out angel-radio." Dean assumed that Cas had known more than he'd told since the beginning, because Cas always knew more than he told. Dean usually liked to wait until the clinch point to call him out on it, but his track record had finally seemed to prove that to be a bad plan. This was an innocent girl they were talking about here, a girl making Cas go googly-eyed and sexual wall-creeper and all sorts of crazy. "You gonna tell me what's going on here, or are we gonna have to call Chuck?"

"Chuck won't be able to help us."  
"It's 'us' this time, is it? 'Cause you're being a real dick right now for being one of 'us'," Dean retorted, as ungraciously as he could. He knew perfectly well that Cas was a pillar of Team Free Will, weak and wobbly as the structure was, but still, the angel could really _grate_ against a guy's nerves.

Castiel turned his strikingly blue, unblinking eyes on Dean. "This is not the time, Dean. Whatever your issues are with me, we need to get Alice away before . . ."

"Before what?"

"Before someone else, some_thing_ else, figures out what she is."

"Um, guys?" Sam's voice was tentative as he stood at the door, trying to break up the little spat his brother was having with his own personal angel in the gentlest way possible. Backlash from Dean'n'Cas quarrels was something Sam had been quick to lean the need to avoid.

In perfect unison the angel and the hunter turned on the little brother and demanded, "What?"

"Cas, what exactly did you do to Alice? She's been staring at her hand from the moment you let go of it," Sam explained, a note of worry in his voice that seemed to say the situation was significantly worse than his words conveyed.

When Alice suddenly screamed, Dean's fears were confirmed.

The three men inside the bunker raced back to Alice, Dean and Cas squeezing through the narrow hall around Sam so that they could see without having to look around the sasquatch's massive figure. Alice wasn't staring at her hand anymore; she was staring at the wall. The wall that Dean had been forced to brush his hand over, the empty, smoothe, chalky wall was now coated in a thin sheen of viscous red. It was dripping down from a hand print, where slim fingers had dragged across the surface.

The hand that Alice was no longer staring at was also coated in the unmistakable ooze of blood. Alice's scream had only stopped because she ran out of air and seemed to have forgotten how to take another breath. She stared, horrified, directly ahead.

Sam and Dean were at her sides in a second. Sam was gently patting the side of her face, murmuring "Come on, Alice, stay with us. Tell us what happened." Dean was checking her hand for cuts, though he was pretty damn sure that a girl Alice's size would have needed to cut her hand _off_ in order to produce this much blood this quickly.

"_Cas_." Dean kept a strong hand on Alice's shoulder as he turned to glare at the angel. "What's happening, what did you do?"

"I didn't _do_ anything, Dean. I merely noticed."

"Noticed _what_?"

"That Alice is something of a reagent factor here." Castiel responded. "She has not _done_ anything, but she is the reason that things are happening."

"I'm a _what_?"

Alice had regained the ability to breathe, to Sam's infinite relief, but she still needed his support to stand. Her grip on his coat sleeve was white-knuckled and trembling. Her knees started to give out, but between Dean's hand on her shoulder, and Sam's on her arm, she was able to remain mostly upright.

"I don't know exactly, something we should be grateful for," Castiel replied. At Dean's look, he added, "If I don't know what she is or how to handle her while standing before her, we can assume with moderate certainty that nothing else in this world can do so either. Most of the things that would want to probably can't get this close to her anyway."

"I need a drink," Alice sighed, completely giving up on the standing thing. "I don't even _like_ to drink," she complained to herself in a high pitched whine that was probably meant to be an internal thought.

Sam slipped an arm under her legs and carefully shifted her into his hold. He could have carried her like that all day for how light she was, but he hurriedly suggested, "Let's get just back to the motel."

Dean agreed without pause. He looked to Castiel for a moment, "You probably can't just bamf us there, can you?"

"I'm sorry, Dean."  
"Damn. Of all the days for Angel Air to putsch out on us," Dean muttered.

Sam asked, "Is there anything we have to worry about? With her, or with . . . Is Alice the reason you're grounded?"

"No, not directly, and not entirely."

"And we still don't know what is?"

"We have more possibilities now."

Dean cursed again. "Is that supposed to be a good thing?"

Castiel blinked in Dean's direction. "I believe you were the one who said 'if it bleeds'."

"We can kill it," Dean recalled. It was something like a mantra for him. It hadn't been terribly relevant lately, as they'd begun running into more and more things that_ didn't_ bleed. Even so, the thought stirred his resolve and stilled his panic enough to follow Sam out to the shop. Dean even had the presence of mind to replace the panel that had kept the bunker hidden for just shy of half a century as Sam and Cas tiptoed their way through the obstacle course of the shop, Sam with his enormous frame and a girl in his arms, and Cas with the trench coat that magically attracted all objects nearby to it like a magnet or fucking gravity.

The trip back to the motel from the shop's front door took about as long as navigating the shop's interior had. But all said and done, Alice was lying peacefully on Sam's bed while Sam, Dean, and Castiel stood outside and tried to figure out their next move.

"We need to gank that ghost before anyone else gets taken by it," Dean affirmed, nursing a beer to his mouth.

"We still don't know who it is though, and even then, unless Alice's miraculous research skills manage to turn up more info, we only know where two of the suspects are buried," Sam pointed out.

For once in a blue moon rising in hell, Castiel was more on Sam's side than Dean's. "We should be looking into Alice, we need to know what she is and why she's making things happen."

Trying not to think about the last time Sam and Castiel had ganged up on him, those dark, all too recent, days of Dean's wavering over giving Michael his _yes_, Dean retorted, "We'll just keep her here for now, or something; and then get her the hell out of Dodge. Damn, I wish we could send her to the Roadhouse. You know, Jo would love having a little-sister-thing running around, Ellen'd love it too." Dean paused, a well of pain he hadn't quite managed to cap bubbling up. He forced it down. "There's got to be somebody. Hell, even Bobby; he could keep her safe, and then we could focus on the things that are killing people."

"It's not that simple, Dean."

"Yeah, Cas? Why not?"

"If Alice goes anywhere her presence will affect all of the latent spirits there as well, and then there'll be two towns with inexplicable happenings to deal with. It would be better to contain the affected region and deal with the source of the problem before we attempt to deal with its consequences," Castiel laid out, his tone reminiscent of a 3rd grade teacher losing patience with an exceptionally belligerent student. "I'm still having trouble sensing things, and I'm still grounded. Whatever she released that is capable of doing such is something we do _not_ want to see roaming free elsewhere as well."

Before Dean could respond, and likely roll the argument further down the road of no return, Sam stepped in with, "I'll look into Alice, maybe something in her history will help explain this whole thing. Dean, you and Cas should see if you can find anything out about grounding an angel, give Bobby a call, let Cas check with his angel friends. This afternoon, we can see if anyone knows anything about our three vigilante candidates."

Dean huffed, but he took a long swig. "Fine."

The three slipped quietly inside trying not to disturb Alice, noticing after only a beat that Alice wasn't there to disturb. The bathroom door was closed and there was a light coming from the crack above the floor. Dean went over and tapped gently, calling her name as Sam pulled his laptop out of his messenger bag and Castiel stared from the door.

When Dean received no answer, he shouted more firmly for her. Sam looked to Castiel for a moment as Dean broke down the door. "Damn it! She's gone."

Incredulous, Sam asked, "How?"

"Bathroom window."

"That thing above the toilet? It's like a foot across."

Without humor, Castiel reminded them, "Alice is very compact."

"I'll go find her. Cas, go see if you can find a way to get your damn mojo back, you're fucking useless right now," Dean hollered, marching across the room and brushing past the angel on his way out to find their little runaway.

Sam looked past Castiel's passive expression to the mix of defensive rage and hurt Dean's words had injected him with. Sam was getting better at reading the angel's blank face, not as good as Dean seemed to be naturally, but better than he'd been. "He doesn't mean it. He just doesn't like it when things spin out of control like this," Sam tried to comfort.

"He is right though," Castiel replied. "With my powers blocked like this, I have little that I can assist you with. If we remove what is grounding me, I can cleanse the bomb shelter and put the spirits to rest without having to specifically identify the spirit responsible for the murders."

Then Castiel did something Sam had never seen before, he _walked_ out the motel room door into the light of the sunrise. Sam set to work trying to uncover hard facts about Alice while fighting a losing battle not to make insensitive and insanely geeky remarks to himself about their lives falling down the rabbit hole, as if they didn't have enough to deal with in the middle of the damn apocalypse.


	4. Hurry Up And Wait

When Sam and Dean next met up, it was over coffee in the so-called 'Nest'. They could see why Alice wasn't particularly thrilled by the food. Dean was eyeing one patron's nachos like they were about to get up and walk away, which Sam figured wasn't all that improbable this week. Coffee in hand, print outs and manila files spread over a sports-bar-like counter, and feeling like fucking Gulliver in the land of the little people as he squeezed into a stilted chair that couldn't possibly have been meant for anyone over the age of twelve, Dean asked, "Did you find anything out?"

"Not much," Sam replied sullenly. Alice was one of those nosy souls that knew that there were other nosy souls about and had protected herself accordingly.

"Can't be worse than me. I found out that she could live in any one of three dorms, but no one really knows for sure which one. She likes toast. She's figured out how to make a Philly cheesesteak out of the roast-beef equivalent of a Slim Jim. And everyone fucking _loves_ her. You'd think she was a Saint or something," Dean rolled out.

Sam sighed in agreement. "I know she's moved around a lot. Her parents are divorced and not on good terms. I think she has a dog too, but no siblings. The main thing I've got is from hacking her internet hangouts through the email she has on the school server; this chick steals more in terms of money not paid to the universe for music every day than we do for stolen cars, ID's, and whatnot in a _month_."

"What?"

"Seriously, the girl downloads music like it's crack. Runs it through a private server too, outsourced to clean the tracks up before they get to her," Sam explained.

Dean shook his head in disbelief. Then he refocused and said, "So we've got nothing."

"Pretty much."

They were quiet for a moment, just sipping their coffee and drowning in the mysterious depths of information they didn't have but sorely needed. In that moment they returned the friendly smiles of at least a dozen students that were walking by like robots.

"This town is fucking creepy."

"Tell me about it. Are these kids zombies or what?"

"I dunno, man. But they're all way too fucking happy," Dean returned, a serious air about his words that told Sam of deep down panic. "We just need to find Alice, and gank whatever's here that's making things go Twilight Zone."

"So you guys _are_ Sam and Dean! Brittany!" the voice that had popped up by Sam's elbow belonged to one of the college students, one that was surprisingly not-zombie-like. "Oh, and we're not always this zombified. It's Hell Week and the whole people-freak-over-finals thing is taken very seriously here." She paused for a moment, looking the brothers over appreciatively, especially Sam. "You know, seeing you in person . . . I might have to start reading these books my friends have been talking about."

"And you are?" Sam wondered, praying to any deity that might be listening that this wasn't another Becky.

"I'm Sam. The Lady Sam among my friends because one of you guys is the Other Sam," the girl explained as another non-zombie girl came up to them.

"Sam, I just called Julie, they're on their way. Hannah didn't answer." Looking to Sam and Dean she said, in a voice suddenly much more breathy but still focused and sensical, "I'm Brittany, we're friends of Alice."

"Do you know where she is?" Sam asked immediately.

Brittany frowned. "We were hoping _you_ knew."

Dean swore. Sam explained, "She ran away from the motel early this morning."

"Why?"

Sharing a look, Sam and Dean wondered just how much to let Brittany in on. If she really was a friend of Alice's, she might know how to find her and what exactly her history was. On the other-hand, even if the 'friends with Alice' bit was still true, Brittany could just be another fangirl and consequently a liability. And then there was the possibility that Brittany was a creature out to snatch Alice away.

It was terribly frustrating, not knowing anything about what they were dealing with. Sam decided to hope for the best and take Brittany at her word, trying gain as much information on the situation as possible. He struggled with how to put the revelation that had driven Alice off as gently as possible. "According to Castiel, Alice is something very important to the grand scheme of things, and she might have a large part in what's happening here."

"Meaning?"

"Cas thinks Thumbelina is some sort of monster magnet," Dean clarified.

Brittany bit back a grin. This was a serious matter. Dean Winchester calling Alice 'Thumbelina' was not something Brittany ought to be laughing at, no matter how suitable or adorable the nickname was. She was about to say something in response to the dire situation of Alice being both paranormally involved and missing when her phone rang.

She picked it up without hesitation. "We have problems."

The voice belonged to Hannah and Brittany knew that an explanation would be coming without prompt. "We found Castiel at the Bell Tower, but no Alice yet, and the bird-brain can't sense her or whatever has her, and he's pretty sure something has her. At least that something wants her."

"Yeah, we found Sam and Dean in the Nest. They said that she's involved in this stuff somehow," Brittany replied.

"Great. Can't say we didn't expect it. Be there in five, angel in tow."

Hanging up without a fuss, Brittany breathed, "Just another chapter for the Kdrama Chronicles of Alice."

"What?"

Brittany looked up, suddenly recalling that she hadn't stepped away from Sam and Dean to take Hannah's call. "Hannah and Winnie, other friends of ours, found Castiel. They're bringing him here now."

"What did you mean about Alice?" Sam clarified before Dean could.

"Hm? Well, this is . . . well, typical is probably the wrong word, but weird shit happens to that girl all the time," Brittany explained. "Like all the fucking weirdoes around pop out of the woodwork the moment she walks by."

"How so?"

"Well, projectors hate her. They pretty much all short out when she's in the room," the Lady Sam offered. "And other inanimate objects attack her. Like the doors on campus."

"And that bike, the one that hit her while chained it was chained up to a wall?"

"Oh, we're sharing weird Alice stories?" This was a new voice, joining the group with the Winchesters' missing angel trailing along. "I need to get in on this. Have you already gotten to how all of her relationships have been pulled right out of dumb romantic movies? Or the universe's penchant for giving her creepers? Or the way random strangers just give her things?"

Another new voice, this one belonging to an Asian girl who looked, incredibly enough, to be the same size, if not smaller, than Alice herself, _bounced_ into the conversation, "Or how she always gets the thingamajigs and the backstageyfulness with awesomerish people-y things!"

Dean blinked. "Dude, is she okay?"

Hannah laughed. "It takes time to learn to speak 'Winnese'."

"I do not believe that 'winnese' is a legitimate language. There is nothing in my understanding of human speech that explains the conceptual correlations that exist among the utterances of-"

Hannah broke in, "Trust me, Cas, it's a language."

"Dean, I do not understand these very compact humans. Neither the Alice nor the Winnie have made coherent sense in relation to my understanding of humans," Cas whined, his voice twisted with dismay at the lack of understanding he had of humanity. Dean could have smiled at how far he angel still had to go before he actually understood humanity, and how far he'd already come to understand what it meant to be human.

It could have been a very touching moment.

"Who would'a guessed that the things to get under the skin of a big bad 'angel of the Lord' would be Thumbelina and a spazzy little teddy-bear?" Dean teased, to Castiel's great discomfort.

"Dean." Sam was giving him one of his most well-practiced bitchfaces, 'shut up, this is clearly not the time'.

In the background Winnie was looking down at the silver sequin teddy bear on her fake-hoodie and spluttering protests that Dean would never have been able to decode. Castiel simply stared at her. She squinted back at him after a moment, when she noticed his attentions. When her reaction did nothing to affect his behavior, her squint deepened into a glare-like expression. "," She huffed, miming a bite in his direction.

Castiel looked desperately to Dean for advice on how to handle the girl that made even less sense than Alice had. "Don't look at me, man. I still think she's diseased."

"_Dean._ Come on, back to Alice? You know, the girl that's gone missing on our watch?"

"She didn't 'go missing', _Sam_," Dean retorted in his best bickering husband at a naggy wife voice. "She ran away."

"I believe that Alice is still an innocent in this, Dean, if that is what you are trying to insinuate," Castiel interjected.

"Alice is a good person, considering the whole pragmatic thing, and with her history she's nicer than anyone ought to be," Hannah correlated.

The Lady Sam jumped in too, "Sure, she's gonna take over the world, but hell, the world would be like a million times better off for it."

"I'm still pissed that she ran off," Dean defended.

Sam couldn't help but tease, "Oh, look. He's worried about her."

The peanut gallery of fangirls-who-were-trying-to-be-professional snickered. Dean looked murderous and would have thrown something at Sam if his target hadn't just then turned to Hannah, asking "What were you saying about her history?"

Hannah sighed. "Just that every crazy thing that could possibly happen to a girl has happened to her. I mean, when she was living in NoVa, our school's principles were caught on real-estate fraud, and the band director was found out as a sexual predator, and the volleyball coach's car exploded . . . and she was right there for all of it. And all her teachers have been out to get her or something, serious vendetta trips, even when she lived in New York for middle school."

Winnie agreed, "And like everywhere she's lived has had these like natural disasteryfulness, and it's kindasorta but not really funny-ish how polar-y extreme her whole life is. _Purple is the best color ever!_"

"Yeah, really," Brittany went on, having understood Winnie perfectly and grinned at the apparently lost expressions of Sam and Dean, "Everything either goes ridiculously well for her or ridiculously bad."

Sam and Dean were still too caught up in watching the overdone gesticulations Winnie was making as she spoke to really comprehend Brittany's words. Castiel on the other had seemed to be able to stare at Winnie while puzzling over her and keep track of the conversation at once. "Her existence is polarized? And if I understand correctly, her history has always been marked by these events?"

"Yeah, as far as we know," Brittany affirmed.

"And you would say you knew well?" Castiel pressed.

Hannah shrugged. "About as well as anyone can, even to us Alice likes telling her life like it's one big kdrama. If I were her I'd edit it a bit, so my guess is that she does."

"This may complicate things," Castiel muttered. He looked to Dean, a firmness in his eyes and voice that spoke of a certainty that had been far too lacking in recent times, "Call Bobby in an hour. I have something to show him, and someone I need to talk to first."

With that, Castiel spun on his heel and marched out of the fake-sports-bar-thing that was the Nest. Dean glared after him. "What the hell does that mean?" Knowing that no answer was coming about Castiel, Dean turned on the little gaggle of girls. "And what the hell is a 'kdrama'."

"Think Dr. Sexy, plus chick flick, plus Asia, times soap opera with some actually decent writing," Hannah tried to clarify.

"Did someone say Asia?"

"Julie!" Winnie bounced the few steps away from the main group it took to assault yet _another_ girl in the we're-friends-with-Alice-so-you-have-to-deal-with-us-too category. "JulieJulieJulieJulie! The angel thinks I'm weird. Did you find Alice? Hezzo Miae!"

The girl that had come in with Julie said, "The Tobi doesn't know what's happening any more. Alice said she'd meet us here."

"Tomorrow," Julie ammended. "I think."

"She was a bit confuzzling."

Brittany wondered, "Where'd you see her?"

"Over by Combs, that's why it took us so long to get here. She said she was gonna grab her violin and chill out in Pollard for a while, experimenting, and then meet us here later. Was it here or Seaco?"

"She'll text us." Miae nodded at her own statement, a gesture to fit words that seemed to mean something poignant among the girls, or maybe was just catching, because it spread through them all in a few seconds.

Hannah turned back to Sam and Dean. "Well, that's it I guess. If Alice has wandered off, we'll never find her. She doesn't answer her phone. And it doesn't have a gps. Whatever you need her for, it'll have to wait."

"Sonuvabitch."

The Lady Sam sidled up to say, "But hey, if there's anything we can help you with…"

Hannah looked sideways at her for a moment, the way Sam looked at Dean when he was being especially obtuse. "Anything non-Alice, non-demon, non-angel, non-creature, non-apocalypse, she means. Unless it's Gabriel. But other than that, we're all for saving the world and everything, but I've got a presidential campaign to help organize and I need to be at work by Monday morning."

Dean was too busy cursing, and haphazardly collecting the papers they'd laid out, to react to not-his-Sam and Hannah. His Sam scribbled on a piece of paper, saying, "We'll be fine. If you hear from Alice, call us."

Sam then half-smiled apologetically and then trudged after his brother, hoping that Dean didn't try to maim anything. As the Winchesters left, Hannah and Brittany indulged in a swirl of chick-flick squealing that met their quota for the next decade at least. They were much more used to Alice's occasional boughts of radio-silence and they weren't half as worried as the Winchesters were about her doing something dumb and getting killed for it. If they knew one thing about Alice it was that physical pain and exertion were the top two things on her list of avoid-at-all-costs.

Meanwhile, the Winchesters decided to head back to the bunker to do a little more investigating into the ghostly murders. Unfortunately the shop had opened up, and getting through the way they'd gone before was definitely off the table. They decided to camp out at Hyperion, a snobbish hipster coffee shop across the street from the Fredericksburg Museum so that Sam could use his own college honed research skills and the coffee shop's much more sensically set up wi-fi system, to find another way in.

As he busied himself with that, Dean fidgeted for about 20 minutes. Then he gave up and called Bobby fifteen minutes before Cas's hour deadline. Bobby didn't pick up. "Damn it, Bobby! Call me back."

He meandered uneasily back to Sam, too tense to take the doldrums of research in his usual stride. Sam looked up at him with the puppydog eyes Dean knew to associate with obnoxiously tender and patronizing concern. He didn't say anything though, because acknowledging Sam at that moment would only have encouraged him. Unfortunately for Dean, Sam's concern for Dean was propelled by the undercurrent of his own concern for Alice. "We'll find her, Dean," he said. The elephant in the square was what they weren't talking about, what they absolutely would be sure _not _to talk about. "We'll get her through this in one piece."

Dean didn't respond, and thankfully his phone rang after only a minute of not-quite awkward silence between the brothers. Sam turned back to his research as Dean picked up tersely, "Bobby?"

"Yeah, it's me, boy."

"Finally. What've you got?"

"Don't you get your panties in a bunch, ya idjit," Bobby hollered through the phone. "Cas was here droppin' bomb-shells like daisies. I called you the moment he poofed out, but that don't mean I've got anything yet."

"Well, what did Cas say?" Dean huffed.

"First, tell me what you know about this Alice girl."

Dean could just picture Bobby leaning back in that chair behind his desk, piles of research material spread out before him as he tried to figure out where in the world to begin. "That's just it, Bobby. We hardly know anything about her. She seems like a good kid, she's really trying to help out here. She can take care of herself, but . . . she's just a kid, Bobby; she's not cut out for this," Dean explained, his words hurried with exasperation and worry.

"Cas seems to think otherwise," Bobby replied slowly. Then when he realized how it would sound to Dean at the moment he jumped to add, "About her being cut out for this. The rest of it's no question, but he seems to think that she was born for something big."

"Did he happen to mention what that something is?"

"Not in so many words. But I may have an idea of what _she_ is." The sound of papers shuffling met Dean's ear through the phone.

He waited a moment to see if Bobby would continue unprompted, but then he pushed, "Care to share with the class?"

"Either of you boys ever heard of the Pillars of the Earth?"

Dean frowned. He turned back to his brother. "Sam. Pillars of the Earth. Ever heard of 'em? Bobby wants to know. He thinks it might have something to do with Alice."

"Nah, never. Unless he means a book about the plague, but it's got nothing supernatural in it," Sam replied. He went on before Dean could tell Bobby, "Let me talk to him. I think I found our way in."

Trading Dean his laptop for the phone, Sam said, "Hey, Bobby, it's Sam."

"Who else would it be, ya idjit?"

A smile tugging at his lips, Sam asked, "What's this about the Pillars of the Earth?"

"I don't got much on 'em, but they seem like a pretty big deal. They got a bunch of names, Pillars of the Earth, Bastions of Fate, Harbingers of the Divine Plan; looks like they're considered the doorways between Heaven and Earth keeping the two divided while bridging the gap between them," Bobby explained.

"So what are they exactly?"

"They're people."

"People?"

"Basically. They're flesh and blood humans, but they've some of the most complicated histories of anyone around. When exactly did this Alice get to the town you're in?"

"She's a freshman from up north, so August 2011? That would probably be around when she got here," Sam replied with as much certainty as he could gather on the topic of Alice.

"You look into the weather at all 'round then?"

"Not really, why?"

"Well, the place was hit with more omens than I can count, but none of them specifically demonic," Bobby explained. "An earthquake, a tornado, record thunderstorms and heat waves, and a hurricane, all within three months; starting from right when she got in. And it hasn't slowed down at all since then. Way too consistent to be a demon's doing, but way too random to be natural."

"So what do we do about her?"

"Do? You get the hell out of her way! And keep her happy while you do it, apparently it's partly their emotional state that determines whether you get hit with rain showers or an ocean."

Sam rephrased his question, "Is she what's keeping Cas grounded?"

"Yes and no. She's what levels the playing field so if there's something already trapped there, like the demon I've got parked outside the panic room for ya, then everything else that comes near her with the same kind of power is gonna be chained down too."

"But Bobby, what are we supposed to do about it? We can't just let this thing stick around. Cas said that if he didn't cleanse the town Alice's influence would just keep pulling on every supernatural creature around, especially the unfriendly ones," Sam related.

Bobby sighed heavily. "I know that, boy, he told me. But what I don't know is how to find this thing, let alone what it is or how to kill it. That thing has mojo with some helluva kick, it can take on an _angel_ for Christ's sake!"  
"Is it an angel? I mean, the only thing we've _ever_ found strong enough to kill an angel is another angel," Sam mused bleakly.

Bobby grunted in agreement. "But it _ain't_ killin' 'em, not that we've seen. It's just strong enough to be in an angel's ballgame. That at least gives us a few more options, but I don't know how long it'll take me to find out how to kill 'em. I can make a few calls but . . ."

"You just keep workin' on it, Bobby," Sam said, resigned. "We're gonna go see if we can't buy us some time."

A huff met Sam's ear. "Yeah, well you idjits had best be lookin' after that Alice. The hurricane hit while she was in a _good_ mood. You don't know what kinda hell she might reign down if a demon gets a hold'a 'er."

Sam did his best to soothe the old hunter before hanging up as Dean pushed a coffee into his hand. "We doin' this or what? I'm getting' antsy."

"Yeah, I noticed."

Dean's eyes narrowed a fraction as he took a swig of go-juice. Hyperion might have been hipster to a fault, but it had some good Joe, and focusing on the coffee was far better than acknowledging Sam's shift into chick-flick mode.

"Listen, I know you don't wanna talk about it, but . . ."

"Can we please just gank this mother- already?" Dean said, brushing his brother off and heading across the street to the thick glass doors of the Fredericksburg Museum.

Sam sighed and ceded for the moment. There were probably worse things to consciously not talk about. Sam himself didn't particularly want to get into it either, but the thought that Alice might end up in trouble, that she might get hurt from this, weighed on his shoulders combining acutely with his recent lack of sleep and the coffee compensation to make him almost jittery as he followed his brother into the museum.


	5. God's Plan, as Explained by a Lit Major

They looked for all the world like regular tourists, young uncles or godfathers or even older siblings of a Mary Wash student that were wandering around town alone while their relation had class. They got through the door without question and the massive building was so understaffed that they had no trouble slipping into the 'Staff Only' section that led to the basement. Then following the schematics Sam had managed to dig up, they found the doorway to the bunker with minimal searching.

Once they were in the bunker, they began poking around in all the rooms, hoping to find some lost file with a dirty little secret inside, or better yet that the ghost would just out and attack them. An attack would make the vengeful spirit's identity obvious, anything short of that was just guesswork. At this point in the game, neither Winchester felt terribly confident in their guessworking abilities.

They went straight to rooting around in the seemingly endless passages, the concrete confines of the bunker's pseudo-city set up giving them more petty frustration than any other of their hunts this year. The people who built this shelter were clearly expecting to live inside it for a long time, building in every nook and cranny they could think of and stuffing the place full of junk that was mean to make living there more comfortable. Normally, they'd be making the best of it, taking the useless tchotchkes in stride and making fun of the people that thought a laughing fish-trophy was somehow valuable.

But today, they were just pissed. Instead of finding humor in the junk, they were focused on trying to make the ghost show itself. Their prodding was to no avail and nothing in the bunker that they could find gave a definite match to the bastard behind it all. They did find a room filled with the putrefying gunk that was the body parts of victims that _didn't_ end up in the back alleyways, but that didn't really count as a victory.

As the hours ticked by, the caffeine began to wear off and their patience dwindled. Things could have started to get hairy when Dean frustration began to manifest in ways no normal person could ignore, and ways that would make Sam call an immediate pow-wow of sharing and caring, but just before Dean would have let loose a string of violent curses, his phone rang. He picked up without hesitation, glad for the distraction if nothing else.

"Dean? Don't hang up."

Gritting his teeth, Dean debated a moment.

"Dean?"

"What do you want, Chuck?"

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Dean looked across the room at Sam, who half smiled sympathetically.

"Yeah, um, do you happen to know where Alice is?"

"Shouldn't you know that already?"

"That's not the answer I was hoping for," Chuck tittered nervously.

Dean jumped on it. "Why? And Cas said you couldn't help us, what's up with that? Aren't you supposed to see everything 'Winchester'?"

"That's just it, I see _you_. I _only_ see you, and stuff that happens to you or relates directly to what happens to you," Chuck responded. "Alice is . . . outside of that, outside of everything really. If I saw what happened to her . . . geez, you've got no idea. Your lives are complicated, but at least they're straight forward. Pretty much everything wants to kill you. Alice's life isn't nearly as unfair, or dangerous, or anything, but it makes way less sense . . . the headaches I would get from watching _her_ crazy life in my hea-"

"Chuck!"

"Oh, right sorry. Um, where was I?"

"Alice, Chuck, you were talking about where Alice is," Dean replied gruffly, adding under his breath, "Christ, man, how drunk _are _you?"

Chuck hesitated. "My liquor store was having a sale on Tequila . . ."

"Chuck, don't make me hurt you."

There was a quick coughing, Chuck clearing his throat and his head. "I saw you rush in to try and save her. Wherever she is, she's not alone."

"Save her from what? Where is she?"

"A ghost, I think; and I don't know where, but the building's under construction."

"I'm gonna need a little more than that, Chuck."

"Um, it's on the south side of campus . . . I couldn't read the sign, but there's a mustang parked out front, and the door's unlocked, and there's a gold Buda on the table in the hall, and . . . She's in the attic and whatever's there with her . . . it's waking up," Chuck finished unsteadily, clearly wanting to say something else.

Dean weighed the odds for a moment and decided that he'd rather risk getting bad news than risk running into yet another fight with less information than he needed. "Spit it out, Chuck. We don't have all day, Alice needs us."

"I know. I know, but Dean?" He paused for another heartbeat, "She's not Jo. You can't bring Jo back by saving Alice; and if you keep trying to make up for Jo's death like this, by seeing her in every girl that tries to help you, you're gonna go crazy."

"I'm not trying to bring back Jo."

Dean's response was quiet, resigned. There was a little tremor in the back of his throat though, something almost dangerous.

"I'm seeing stuff, Dean, and it's scaring me."

_Try Advil, and maybe lay off the Angel LSD._ Dean's reply never even reached his tongue. He just couldn't. "I'm not trying to bring her back, but she was still my fault. I don't want anyone else to be my fault; I won't _let_ anyone else be my fault."

"You can't save everyone, Dean."

"Yeah? Well, I can try."

Dean hung up without hearing Chuck's reply.

He looked around quickly, anxious to see if Sam had stuck around to listen in. Sam had heard everything, but when Dean found him a few rooms over, he pretended he hadn't. All the indication he gave of having heard was a lingering look that screamed _are you okay?_ before he followed his brother back up to the museum.

Dusk had settled over the town as they reached the ground floor of the museum. Dean was in too much of a rush to even notice the very surprised clerk as they pushed by, well after closing. Sam sent her an apologetic look but didn't slow down for an instant. As he marched back toward campus with Dean, he asked about what Chuck had said about Alice's location.

He didn't mention hearing Dean talk about Jo.

Sam knew he probably should have, but he didn't want to talk about her either.

Instead he asked for confirmation, "And we're looking for a Mustang?"

"Yeah, Chuck said it was the only car parked out front."

"You mean like that one?"

Dean looked to where Sam was staring, puzzled, because he'd already spotted the outline of the yuppie modern muscle car. To his dismay, he saw that Sam hadn't suddenly become delusional. There was a mustang parked outside of a building to their left. There was another one parked out in front of the building right next to it. And a third further down the street.

"Jesus Christ."

Dean couldn't comprehend the situation for a moment. It was just too improbable. In a town this size, for there to be four mustangs sitting on the same street was simply ridiculous. And worse, looking back to the first one he'd spotted, he thought that the roof of the car the next drive over looked suspiciously Mustang-ish. After a second of disbelief, Dean managed to refocus. They _had_ to get to Alice.

"Right, you take those, I'll take the ones over there," Dean directed. "Door's unlocked, the place is under construction, and there'll be a Buda on a table in the hall. If you find the Buda . . ."

"Yeah, I will," Sam responded. "You call me too. Don't just rush in on your own."

Dean wasn't listening; he'd already begun trudging down the street to the first mustang he'd spotted. The door on the first one he tried was locked. The second one he tried wasn't, but there was no little table with a Buda. Standing on the steps of the half hidden apartment building, Dean looked up along Campus Walk and spotted another Mustang, and then another further up the circular drive.

"For the love a-"

He only wasted an instant with cursing. Within a few seconds he was back on track and searching for Alice. And then he found it, a little gold Buda sat on the table, offering up Twizzlers to passersby in the entryway of the Framar Multi-Cultural-Experience Dormitory. The building had plastic sheets covering the inside of the windows because it was being remodeled, and a garish orange mustang was parked right out front.

Dean hit the phone in his pocket without taking it out, he knew that it had some sort of walkie-talker mode that Sam had set up. Eventually it would connect to Sam, and Dean needed to focus on acquiring a weapon and finding his way to the attic. An iron poker by a fireplace on the ground floor accomplished step one; and Sam's voice crackled out of his pocket as he was running up a flight of stairs, working on step two, "Dean?"

"The Mustang's orange, and it's outside someplace called 'Framar House,' half way up the hill onto the main campus," Dean barked.

"Have you found her?"

"Not yet."

"Be there in five."

Dean grit his teeth and just pushed harder up the stairs, taking two at a time. Each staircase only took him up half a landing and he had to cross to the other side of the pseudo level to get to the next staircase. If he ever found who designed the buildings in this fucking fun-house of a town, Dean would take his time reorganizing the douche-bag's face to match his chaotic creations.

And then he reached the floor where the stairs ran out.

Alice wasn't there.

Across the small empty room of the attic was a door, and Dean threw it open without a moment's hesitation. Storming through, Dean was immediately flung to the side, slammed into the concrete of the reinforced wall by the unfortunately familiar sensation of non-corporeal energy; a vengeful spirit out for blood.

Barely keeping his grasp on his iron poker, Dean recovered enough to swing blindly. He must have hit the spirit because the pressure on the back of his neck disappeared suddenly and he could push away from the wall, pulling in oxygen as he looked frantically for Alice and for the spirit out to get her. "Alice!"

"Dean?"

Her voice sounded breathy and anxious, but Dean couldn't pinpoint where it was coming from before he was thrown across the room again. This time Dean had spotted the ghost responsible, a girl that looked to be about eight or nine at most. She hit like a jackhammer and was hell bent on playing with Dean like a rag doll. She was smiling at Dean in the creepy way he'd only ever seen before with Lilith in her vessel in Indiana.

"Dean!"

This was Sam, coming in just as Dean was launched back across the room.

"Find Alice!"

"Sam, I'm down here!"

Looking around frantically, and trying to ignore the part of his brain that was screaming at him to kill the thing that was hurting his brother, Sam was at a loss. "Alice?"

"Closet, right side of the room, trap door, shotgun."

"Right."

Following her instructions, Sam found himself with his hand on the pommel of a familiar weapon. Without hesitation he pulled it out of the cranny Alice had squeezed into, pointed it at the little girl attacking Dean, and pulled the trigger. A shell full of salt exploded from the barrel and dispersed the ghost.

The ghost took a second to recover and Dean took the opportunity to shout, "Alice, what the Hell? Where are you?"

"I'm in between the attic floor and the great hall's ceiling," she called back.

Sam came over to the trap door, checking to see that the hole was indeed far too small for either of the brothers to fit through to get to her. If she was stuck they'd have to rip up the floor. But then he noticed something. "Metal . . . Iron. Alice, is that some sort of old subduction heating system?"

"What?"

Dean's comment was ignored as Alice answered. "Yeah, it was very experimental, put in during the 40's. It didn't really go well and it's been pretty much forgotten, but the ghost was a little girl when she dropped her doll inside through one of the little vents and tried to crawl through the intake in the closet to get it. She didn't know she was claustrophobic until she flipped out and slammed her head against the upper part and knocked herself out. Face down and blacked out, she suffocated in an hour."

"So why the hell are you in there?"

"Hello? Iron vault? I'm untouchable here," Alice sassed. "Besides, she was cremated, but her doll was made with her hair, and it's still down here."

"Can you torch it?"

"I haven't found it yet."

"Well, you might want to hurry up with that," Sam encouraged as the little girl blinked back into existence, a new target in her sights.

Sam fired off another round of salt, checking his coat pockets and realizing he only had four shots left. As he reloaded, the girl reappeared. Dean took her out with a quick swipe from his iron poker while Alice shuffled around beneath his feet and shouted back, "This isn't exactly the easiest place to move around in. And if I see another spider . . . I swear, I'd rather face the ghost girl than these things and their vicious dust-bunny minions."

Another apparition and one less shotgun round.

Dean got her twice again with the poker before Alice shouted that she'd found the doll.

"Then gank this bitch, already!"

The sound of scraping from a lighter echoed through the attic. The repetition of the scraping made a stone of dread sink into Dean's stomach, solidifying when Alice shouted, "It's not working! The dust got into it."

"Where are you?"

Alice kicked as hard as she could at the metal ceiling of the space she'd squeezed into, making a loud enough thump to let the boys pinpoint her location. Dean was closer. "Alright, Alice? There's a vent under the window by the wall your closest to; if you can get there, I can give you my lighter."

"Dean!"

At Sam's shout, Dean swung without hesitation, slicing through the girl to disperse her. Unfortunately it hadn't been before she'd managed to fling Dean into the wall. His fingers scrabbled to keep ahold of the poker, but it slipped away and clattered to the floor. Instead of reaching for it immediately, Dean grabbed his lighter from his pocket and ripped the vent cover off of the floor. He'd just thrown the lighter down when the ghost grabbed his foot and swung him away from the wall, dragging him across the floor.

Sam stopped her with another blast of salt, and then used the last of his arsenal to keep her from slamming him into the floor a moment later. When she next reappeared it was only for an instant as she was consumed into flames. A few deep breaths were had before Sam reached for the light switch an flooded the room in incandescence. Considering how they'd been fighting it didn't look that worse for wear, due to the dust and tarps and rubble of construction.

"What the Hell is _that_?"

"Huh?" Sam was taken aback by Dean's question, more so when he realized that Dean was staring, aghast, at him. No, not him; his hand. or rather the gun in it.

The brightly colored pink and white shotgun, complete with hearts and a cutesy kitty face, was some sort of monstrosity; and oxymoron incarnate. "Is that glitter?"

Sam looked at it more closely. "I think it is."

"It's Hello Kitty," Alice's voice called. "My uncle bought it for me as a joke."

"They really _make _those?"

"Apparently." There was a moment of near silence as the Winchesters tried to absorb that and Alice wriggled her way back to the closet's just-wide-enough access point to the heating cavity. Then Alice called, "Um, guys? A little help over here?"

Alice's hands were visible, waving at them from inside the closet, the rest of her still concealed under the floor. Carefully pulling her out, the discovered that she looked grey and ghostly herself, coated in a thick film of grime. Dean looked her over as she tried to wipe the worst of it off of her face.

"What the Hell were you thinkin', kid? Runnin' off like that?" Dean demanded. "And what in God's name gave you the bright idea to come here?"

Alice didn't answer for a moment. Instead she set to work fitting the bright pink shotgun into the case she's fitted for it from a modified violin case. "It's me," she said at last. "It's really me. It's my fault that stuff is happening around here. I hang out in Hyperion all the time usually on weekdays like when the victims were taken, and I pass by Mercer every day. Framar's ghost had never really done anything, but it was always a legend. I waltz in and ten minutes later this place is the pin-up of a poltergeist problem."

"We've got a theory about that," Sam mentioned, trying to soothe her. "It's not your fault that these things are happening, not really."

"What's your theory?"

Dean ruffled her hair and then marched towards the exit. "We'll explain it back at the motel, Thumbelina. Right now, we need to get you cleaned up and well away from things that go bump in the night."

Alice sighed, sure that if she asked to go back to her dorm instead she'd only make it five feet before one of them grabbed her and simply carried her back with them. She decided that protesting would accomplish nothing and make things more troublesome in the long run, so she followed them docilely back across campus.

They found Castiel sitting stiffly on the bench outside their room, looking every inch a serial killer. "Don't worry, nobody around here is really suspicious of anything," Alice assured. In the same breath as Dean unlocked the motel room door, Alice laid claim to the first shower of the evening.

She'd completely forgotten that she didn't have anything with her to replace the filthy clothes she was wearing until Dean grabbed her arm as she was trying to rush towards the bathroom and handed her an oversized tee shirt he'd yanked out of his duffel. "You can sleep in this tonight and we'll get you some real clothes by the time you wake up."

"Thanks."

Dean hadn't let go of her arm yet.

He looked hard at her, his grip tightening and his eyes narrowing a fraction.

"Don't make me handcuff you to the showerhead."

"I'll be good, I promise," Alice said, smiling softly. "I only ran off because I wanted to test it, and I knew you wouldn't let me."

Letting go of her arm, Dean huffed, "Think there might've been a reason for that?"

Alice hesitated and thought about turning the mildly sappy moment into a full on feelings-fest, but thought better of it and smiled softly as Dean busied himself with his duffel. The shower she took was short and cold, because she ran out of hot water in the first four minutes and she could hardly stand to stay under the stream long enough to get the grit out of her hair. Taking a proper shower was at the top of her list of things to do later that day, when she got back to her dorm.

Thinking of her dorm, her friends hadn't heard from her in a while.

But she didn't have her cell phone. There was a phone on the table outside the bathroom though, and that would work. Probably. Alice wasn't quite sure she would be able to remember her friends' numbers without her phone's contacts list. But then she remembered that Sam had a laptop and she could drop her friends a line on Facebook in only a few fingertaps. She didn't even really like phones anyway.

With nothing but Dean's shirt on, it hung down to her knees and she'd worn less around the dorm, she slipped out into the motel room with only a slight tick of embarrassment. The boys weren't there so Alice helped herself to Sam's laptop, sending her friends a quick message in the minute she had to herself.

The Winchesters returned just as she hit send. Sam gave her a smile, grabbing a pair of sweats from his bag and heading to the bathroom. Dean looked her over quickly and then tossed her a flannel shirt before heading to the kitchenette. "You like hot chocolate? Or are you one of those crazy chicks freakin' out over the freshman fifteen?"

"Hot chocolate's good," Alice said slipping her arms into the shirt.

She'd been shivering a bit despite the end-of-spring warmth, the shower and the shock of the day having gotten to her more than she'd thought. The shirt smelled better than she'd ever imagined, aftershave and motor oil and cheap detergent mixing together in a warm, comforting smell that sat softly in the background of her awareness. If she'd been told she would be wearing Dean's shirt three days ago, she'd have dropped dead of a fangirl-spasm. Now though, she was clinging to it to stay sane.

Whatever it was that she apparently was, it was sending her head running in circles of guilt and worry and power trips and potential and defeatism and hot chocolate. Alice blinked at the Styrofoam cup that had been pushed into her awareness. Dean sat down across from her, a beer in his hand as he kicked his feet up.

He slid a folder off the table, opening it up to Alice's picture.

"What exactly am I?"

"Well," Dean said shifting heavily in his seat and transitioning into his _talking to kids_ mode. Alice tried not to be offended. She figured at this point that she was something between a horrible reminder of Jo's death and of Ben's Hunter aspirations. "According to Bobby, you're some sort of clinch-point of history; you push everything that might happen into actually happening. Cas thinks there's more to it, but he's not telling us what yet."

"Where is he?"

Gesturing at the door, Dean said, "He's setting up wards or something, against just about everything. He seems to think that more than just what's already here wants to get their hands on you and that nifty talent of yours."

"Is there any way to turn it off?"

"Not forever, maybe not entirely even for a while," Dean said, apologetically. "We can take you up to Bobby's for a while, and he'll be able set you up somewhere safe."

"Dean, I don't want to go anywhere."

"You know we can't just let you stay here."

"Cas said something about purifying the town, right? That he could clean it up if we got to whatever's making him so weak, if we get rid of the big thing, then I can handle the smaller ones," Alice said. Then puffing up a little, proud of her accomplishment, she added, "Actually, I'd already taken care of one before you got here. Russell Hall had a pyro-ghost that my friends and ganked like clockwork."

Dean hardened. "What about you, though? We can't just leave a kid here to do our job. You should be able to live your life away from that and Bobby knows a guy, lives in the middle of New York, he's a Hunter, damn good one too from what Bobby says. You can have your schooling and everything, but . . ."

"What if I wanna do it?"

"Excuse me?"

"What if I wanna Hunt?"

"Out of the question."

Alice bristled, but kept her voice soft, "Why? I draw the mooks out like moths to a flame. I'd be great to have around. One Hunter team could clear a whole town of centuries of bad mojo with me along for the ride. And they'd never have to _look_ for a Hunt again, they'd pop up everywhere. It would make sense to use this thing, since I've got it."

"We're trying to protect you, dragging you into this, this messed up life . . . it's not like the damn books, it's not fun, it's not cool. It sucks and you don't want it. It's shit, and all it ever adds up to is dirt and blood."

"And freedom."

Alice waited a moment, letting Dean process her addition. "It sucks and it's awful, but the life means more than adventures and monster hunting. You _save_ people." Dean's eyebrows shot up in silent protest. He wasn't doing a very good job of the saving people thing lately. And with the Apocalypse rolling on its merry way, things were going to get much worse.

It was obvious what he was thinking.

"I'd rather have choice in Hell than a Stepford paradise."

"You've never been there."

Alice shrugged. "Maybe not. But you have. And you decided the same thing. You trying to keep me safe is just a little less than sticking me in Stepford."

"It's not your life."

"But it's your job right?" Alice took a deep breath, digging on all of her literary experience to be as sappy as humanly possible in a way that would still connect to Dean Winchester. "You can't save everyone, Dean. You just can't. And you shouldn't fight so hard to try, not like this. It's not just because you'll go crazy. Some people don't _want_ to be saved." She took a deep breath, looking carefully to see if Dean was still listening. Then she let her eyes fall to her hot chocolate. "Sometimes people mess up, make the dumb choice. Sometimes people choose things even though they know they're gonna get hurt. And yeah, it's stupid, but it's their choice; it's okay. Free will's what you're fighting for, right? Well, free will is messy and hard. It's full of regrets and almost never ends well for anyone. But at least it's real; it's the world we made with our own two hands, our choices, our mistakes."

The sound of the shower squeaking to a stop echoed in the brief silence.

"I want to Hunt, Dean," Alice said. She left out how she didn't actually want to be the one hunting, but being present on a Hunt was close enough for the statement to fit. "Starting with this thing that's holding Cas back."  
Dean huffed as Sam opened the door of the bathroom, pulling a tee shirt over his head. Dean looked up at his little brother for a second before he flipped the folder closed, tossed it on the table and took his turn to claim the shower.

It only took until he started the water before Sam asked, "What on earth did you say to him? I need to use it the next time he tries to go all super-male."

Alice grinned. "I only told him what he already knew."

There was a quiet moment as Sam finished rubbing his hair dry with a towel. When he came over to take Dean's spot, he looked Alice over sympathetically and asked, "How ya holdin' up? I'm sure there's a hundred things you'd rather be doing right now."

"Honestly? There's probably only twenty things I'd rather be doing, and most of them involve getting clean clothes on before coming right back here," Alice explained. She paused for a moment, before saying, "You know, Dean might be the one everybody should keep an eye on, but you shouldn't beat yourself up too badly either."

"What?"

"Jo's not your fault. And no matter what happens to me, I'm not your fault either."

Sam's deep breath wasn't quite shaky. "I know."

"Do you? Really? Because I don't want you guys, _either_ of you, to do anything desperate," Alice said. "If you do something stupid because you're caught up on all the idiots like me that wouldn't let you save them, then _you'll_ be _our_ fault, and that would suck."

Sam smiled. "Don't worry about us, okay? If you manage to keep yourself safe, we'll have no reason to do something stupid."

"Is that supposed to be comforting? I get attacked by doors. Are you gonna jump at a dumb plan the next time I trip, or walk into a wall because I'm not paying attention?" Alice asked; her words serious even as they were teasing and playful.

"So long as you don't swan dive down some stairs, I think we're good," Sam laughed. "Don't stay up all night okay?"

That was the first moment Alice considered sleeping. It showed on her face. "I knew it. You were planning on staying up all night, _again_, weren't you?"

"I'm a college student, going to bed is for the weak," Alice returned.

"Don't make me call Cas," Dean interjected, coming out of the bathroom in sweats with a towel around his neck. The sight successfully distracted Alice from her conversation with Sam because of her internal fangirling spasm, which was a struggle to keep contained.

Alice managed to keep from squealing openly, but that wouldn't have held true if she'd opened her mouth, or had even breathed. Fortunately, Dean grabbed a shirt and pulled it over his head saying, "I'll be in the car. If you're not in bed in five minutes, I'm havin' Cas put his whammy on you."

"Yes, mommy."

Sam snickered.

"You too, this isn't a slumber party, girls."

Sam made a face at his brother, making Alice laugh. After Dean ignored him and slammed the door behind him, Sam got up and stretched. He looked pointedly at Alice before collapsing into bed. He was snoring within the minute, adjusting the pillow unconsciously to make it as comfortable as he could.

Alice stared at him without shame. Her hot chocolate wasn't quite popcorn, but she sipped at it like the only snack she had for the best show of the year. Sam Winchester was one of the most amazingly gorgeous people on the planet and apocalypse or no, Alice was always one to appreciate aesthetics. She was uninterrupted in her creeping until just after she'd finished her hot chocolate.

Opening the door with exceptional care, Castiel made his way silently inside. He looked at Sam sleeping for a moment before looking over his shoulder at Dean camping out in the Impala, a smile ghosting over his severe expression. Alice's attention had entirely switched to the angel.

"It's nice, huh? Just letting them get a little rest," Alice whispered.

"You require rest as well."

Alice shrugged. "But I can get it later. These guys . . ."

Getting up, Alice stretched her sore muscles. She probably ought to get sleep, she would normally be exhausted, but the adrenalin of the recent days was still coursing through her. Not to mention the fact that seeing two incredibly gorgeous half-naked men walking around was enough to wake anyone up.

Castiel was looking at Dean again; the only part of him visible through his Baby's windshield was his knee. It was enough. The posture screamed that Dean was about as comfortable and content as it was possible for him to get. And that made the angel and Alice alike smile in his general direction.

"Take a seat, Cas," Alice cooed. "Stay a while."

Castiel looked at her in confusion as she slipped under the bedcovers.

"I've got some questions for you."

"Why aren't you more unsettled by this?"

Alice grinned. "I thought _I_ was the one with questions."

"You have questions, but you don't ask them. You don't need the answers they'll bring you," Castiel replied.

"I still want to know."

"Ask your questions."

"What exactly am I?"

"You are a metaphysical nexus of the potential energy of the Divine Plan, a staging area, if you will, for the execution of God's Will," Castiel explained.

Alice blinked at him. "Okay then."

"So in this Apocalypse scheme the angels have going on," Alice went on after a moment. "Is my name on the Billing Slip?"

"I don't-"

"Does anyone up there want to make me their meat-suit?" Alice amended, her grin refusing to recede.

"No, you do not have a role in this. Your place in the Plan is much more abstract; you are not meant to enact anything personally, you are merely the lubricant for the gears of Divine action," Castiel soothed in a very non-soothing way.

The car-ish metaphor made Alice look out to the Impala. "Gears of the Divine Plan, eh? What about them? Are they the gears that move the world?"

"Yes. They are . . . they are very special," Castiel replied softly.

"And you?"

"What do you mean?"

"You're not just an instrument of Heaven anymore, so are you like them? Taking things into your own hands? Or are you like me, and just here helping to move things along?"

Castiel didn't answer. Instead, his eyes combed slowly over Alice. He looked to Sam briefly, before looking behind him again to Dean. "They need you, Cas, _with_ them. I can guarantee that it doesn't matter what you do, if you try to change the world on you own or let it run its course, so long as you're with them, as long as you keep betting on Team Free Will . . . it'll all work out in the end."

The angel glanced sadly in her direction.

"Hey, would I lie? I'm the metaphysical nexus of the Divine Plan, I know these things," Alice told him saucily.

"You cannot know the Plan," Castiel contested. "You are not a Prophet, the Angels don't speak to you, and you have not read the Word. Even I, I who has stood in Heaven, cannot even fathom the Plan. Or if there even is one at this point."  
"And yet, which of us had _accidently_ caused a hurricane?" Alice countered. "When you get to be as ridiculously over-analyzing and emotionally attached to fictional characters as I am, you too will be able to read the patterns of the wind, and see past the buffeting of it to the straight and true course of the beelines. Trust me, there's a Plan, and it's bigger than this whole petty angel Armageddon thing."

Castiel's clear blue eyes searched Alice's face for a long moment before she said, "Cas, I'm kidding. I don't know the Plan any better than you do. I probably know it less. But what I do know is that no matter how much crap happens, things have a way working out how they're supposed to. Sometimes pain is just a set up for the happy ending."

"You are a very perplexing human."

"And you are a very perplexing angel. I'm not one of those girls that's all 'just kiss already' but you have to know how much they care about you, especially Dean," Alice murmured. "No matter what Dean did, almost saying Yes and all that, it wasn't because he didn't know how much you gave up for him. It means a lot to him that you didn't give up _on_ him, and I can promise you that won't _ever_ give up on you."

Castiel's shoulders heaved as he inhaled and exhaled slowly. "But this _Plan_, how can you be sure that God's plan is _good_, that it is just? How can you see all of this, know that God's not answering, and still think there even _is_ a plan?"

"There's a glimpse beneath that angel armor…"

The angel bristled.

"The Plan's _not_ just. It can't be. Somebody has to be the main character, and that means that somebody else has to be expendable. It sucks, but it can end well. And deep down, I'm sure you already know that. Just look at Dean, he's the poster boy of 'screw the plan', and yet he wakes up every morning and puts one foot in front of the other, trusting that the ground will be there when he takes his next step. There's Faith in that guy somewhere, even if he doesn't know it, or know what he's got Faith in. And you do too. Besides, you rebelled against Heaven, disobeyed the Host directly, and yet here you are, Grace intact."

"Intact it may be, but unmarked it is not."

"What is taint but the tie-dye of Life? Flawless things are not nearly as beautiful as the things that show their scars. You're lost, Castiel, but you've got to find your own way back. The good news is that all roads lead to Rome, so you'll get there eventually," Alice rambled.

She sighed heavily. "Okay, we've officially stepped into the land of Lit Major BS. I am _way_ too tired for this. You don't think your angel mojo might help me get some sleep? I'm seriously wired here."

"I have no idea what you're trying to say," Castiel admitted.

Alice shrugged. "You've got all night to think about it."

The angel lifted his hand and gently tapped two fingers to her forehead, guiding her carefully down onto the pillow without banging against the headboard. He watched her for a moment before standing and walking outside. The sleeping figure in the Impala held his attention for another moment, but then he was walking back to the Bell Tower that functioned like an antenna for him to escape through. He had one more person to try talking to about this.


	6. Revelations of St Alice, the SemiDivine

Dean was the first one up the next 'morning'.

As they'd only managed to make it back at around 4am, noon was in sight when Dean finally stirred from the luxurious leather of his bunk for the night. He got up and stretched out his muscles looking around out of habit for anything that might be counted as suspicious.

Letting himself into the motel room, Dean spotted Alice curled up into a tiny ball on 1% of the bed. Her clothes had been angel-dry-cleaned and were neatly folded at her feet. On the next bed, Sam was just beginning to stir with signs of waking.

Dean shut himself in the bathroom and washed his face in cold water. Waking up in the mornings was never fun; the nightmares of Hell, the anxiety of having missed something, the phantasms of faces lost along the way. Dean pulled the bottle of Jack down from the medicine cabinet and took a quick swig. The burn grounded him in reality and woke him up, and this little wouldn't cloud his mind at all for the fight to come.

He washed he face again, letting the chill of the water seep into his features.

And then he grabbed a towel and pushed everything deep down so that he could do his damn job like a man.

Coming out into the main room, Dean swore.

He threw the wet towel in his hand at Sam, starting him into full awareness, as he stormed across the room cursing, "Damn kid needs a _leash._"

Sam figured it out in an instant. Alice was gone, again.

Scrambling out of bed, Sam charged after his brother, only to be stopped in his tracks right outside the door as he rammed into Dean. Alice was sitting on the bench outside the motel room's window, dressed and ready to work. She had Sam's laptop balanced on her knees and was typing away.

Neither Winchester knew quite how to handle it.

"Um, what're you doing?" Dean demanded.

"Getting my 'five minutes a day' of sunlight," Alice snipped. "What do you think I'm doing, I'm waiting for you! Now, are you guys going to get dressed or are we just going to hang out here all day?"

Sam and Dean looked to each other quickly and shrugged. They went back inside and emerged a few minutes later just as ready to roll as Alice. They joined her out on the bench to discuss the fact that they didn't actually have a game plan.

"_You_ don't have a game plan," Alice corrected. "Well, I don't yet either, not exactly; I'm still waiting on that email, but I've got a plan to get a plan."

"What?"

"There's only so many things that can take on an angel, right?"

"Yeah, but we've got Bobby making some calls," Dean said.

Sam added, "As soon as he figures out what it is, we'll tell you."

Alice grinned. "I decided to go about it a different way. Since there's only so many options, and they've all gotta be tied up around here somewhere in order to hold Cas down, I had my friend Hannah ask her mom to do some research on how to hold something with that kind of power down."

"_What_?"

"Hannah's mom is a research _goddess_; she puts my skills to shame."

Dean was still incredulous, but Sam saw what she'd been aiming for. "You think that if you know what sort of trap it needs, you might be able to figure out where it's been hidden away."

"Exactly."

"And?"

"Still waiting on the e- wait! I've got something, take a look," Alice said, tilting the screen up so that the boys sitting next to her could read along with her. According to the information in Alice's email, no matter what it was that they were trying to tangle with, in order for it to be tied down effectively a lot of open space was needed, space that wouldn't be disturbed by the elements or wannabe explorers.

Sam commented, "This is some heavy-duty spell work. It would take a warehouse to contain all of this."

"How many of those are lying around this not-so-sleepy-hollow?" Dean wondered. The town only had six streets in it, so hopefully the list would be a short one.

"I don't think it's gonna be in a warehouse, there's not really anywhere to hide something around here. Not above ground, anyway," Alice murmured, thinking out loud. "But maybe _under_ground. The bunker would be big enough, I think."

"Bunker? The one in town? That bunker was built like a rat maze," Dean protested. "There's not enough space for this."

"Oh, no! Not the bunker by Hyperion! There's one on campus too, under Ball Circle. That one's probably got enough space for anything," Alice explained.

"How many freakin' bunkers does this town have? Place is full'a crazy people," Dean huffed, shaking his head disapprovingly.

Alice could only agree with that, so she shrugged and closed the laptop. "Up for a recon mission? The entrance to the bunker is somewhere in my dorm's basement, so I can get us all in right now."

"You know, I think the "just don't die" plan is my very favorite," Sam said sarcastically.

"Relax, Sammy. It's always worked before."

"No, it hasn't," Alice chided. "But this isn't a 'rush in and kill it' mission, this is a 'rush in and look at it behind glass' mission. If we can get a look at it, we can probably figure out what it is faster than if we keep trying the books."

Sam sighed and Dean tried not to remember the consequences of past failures to plan things through. Their thoughts were interrupted by the voice of Castiel, approaching the trio from the direction of the UMW campus. "I believe that Alice is correct in this matter, we must look at the creature we are hunting."

"Well that settles it then," Dean said, stretching in prep to go commando on some spook-puppet-master.

"I should do it alone."

"Excuse me? Cas, we're not letting you just waltz in on this thing alone," Dean reprimanded, "It's suicide."

"Oh, _now_ it's suicide," Sam muttered.

He was ignored.

"If I temporarily bind Alice's power, I should regain a certain degree of remote viewing," Castiel explained. "It should be enough to tell us what it is that we're dealing with."

"Can you do that? Can he do that?" Dean asked, looking to Sam.

"I thought your angel mojo wouldn't work on her," Sam mentioned.

"It seems that it has a limited effect," Castiel replied. "Last night when I helped Alice to bed, she didn't react like either of you two, but she did accept the inducement."

Dean stared at him for a moment. "Well, that doesn't sound creepy at all."

Another moment passed before Sam asked, "In order to bind her power what exactly would you have to do?"

"I will need your help. Containment sigils large enough to fit Alice inside, laying down, and there's a serum that she will need to drink," Castiel explained. "And Alice, I will need your consent. I cannot guarantee that it will not be a painful experience."

"Will it get us what we need to get rid of whatever's hiding out in my school?"

"It is the safest way to do so, and I can assure you that it will be effective to that end."

Alice sighed. "Well then, Angelcakes, let's get a move on."

Castiel led them back inside, instructing Sam and Dean to move the table and pull the covers off one of the beds. The angel began drawing out circles and squiggles of Enochian out on the bedspread the boys laid out on the floor using a can of spray paint he produced from his over coat. The rest of the blankets were folded up to be exactly as long and wide as Alice and were laid out in the center of the circle.

Dean was given the spray paint to finish the symbols, knowledge of which Cas imprinted on his brain with his two-fingers-of-terror. Castiel's insta-learn made Dean dizzy enough that he hardly noticed as the angel grabbed his arm and pulled a slim blade sharply over his skin. His belated protest came as he watched Castiel dip the blade coated in his blood into a small vial of green liquid. The liquid turned black for a moment before it dissolved into the original green color, and Castiel looked to Sam.

The younger Winchester looked for a moment like he wanted to resist, but Castiel didn't give him the chance. Another drop of blood was stirred into the vial as Castiel explained, "This will allow you to share the burden of whatever might happen, to reduce the strain on Alice's system once I put her under."

"Under what? Is this like anesthesia or something? How dangerous _is_ it?" Alice asked, rapid-fire. She was beginning to have second thoughts.

"It will not be lethal, and it won't cause permanent damage. It will be similar to the dream walking induced by the dream-root-concoction you may have read about in Chuck's prophecies."

"_Dream a Little Dream of Me_! With that Jeremy kid," Alice recalled. "That ended moderately well."

While she was musing over Chuck's stories, Castiel was rolling up his sleeves. He cut into the skin on his arm, but instead of mixing the blood into the vial of green, Castiel used it to draw an Enochian squiggle on Alice's forehead. Then he drew a similar symbol on her palms and told her to drink the potion he'd provided.

Taking a whiff of the contents, Alice balked. "Where in Hell did you get this?"

"I had a friend in Heaven; he collected a lot of interesting artifacts, non-traditional weaponry," Castiel said, a tinge of something more than his usual curtness in his voice.

Alice would have asked about it, but that would have been far too girly-empathy-moment so instead she downed the liquid in her hand. It was dreadful and she forced it down with a coughing fit, glaring daggers at the angel.

"Ready?" Castiel asked, seemingly oblivious.

"No, somebody get me some alcohol."

"Are you even old enough to drink?" Dean said, handing over a bottle of the strongest stuff he had in the cooler.

"I'm old enough to know that I can down a bottle of peach vodka in an hour and still play bar-tender without ending up on the floor," Alice retorted taking a sharp swig as Dean raised his eyebrows, impressed. Alice let the liquor, bourbon by the taste of it, roll around in her mouth. The alcohol's sharp and bitter taste was nasty in a different, more bearable and familiar way than the green slime she'd forced down before it.

Castiel waited a moment, until after Alice gave Dean his bottle back and Dean took a swig of his own before returning it to the cooler, before the angel instructed Alice to lie down. She acquiesced without protest; the green stuff packed a punch. It felt like she'd drunk a _bottle_ of bourbon, not just a sip, and the queasiness eased a bit once she was flat on her back in the center of the circle.

Taking deep breaths, as instructed by Castiel, Alice watched as Sam and Dean crouched outside the circle by her arms and Castiel kneeled at her side. Cas used his mojo to push Alice into sleep like he had last night and then told Sam and Dean to hold her arms. Establishing the connection between Castiel and Alice would be the most difficult and the most potentially painful part; if she thrashed, she could hurt herself.

"I can't believe I'm going along with this," Dean muttered, taking ahold of Alice's arm.

Sam just looked at him sympathetically as Castiel placed a hand firmly on the center of Alice's chest. Dean didn't even make a joke about it as he watched Cas concentrating. The angel lit up from within, angel power flooding through him and pushing itself into Alice.

The boys didn't see anything that happened in the next 20 minutes as Castiel found astral-Alice looking down at her body with an eerie fascination. He finished the binding spell by using the blood sigils on her hands to magically handcuff her and then asked her to guide him to where the creature was hidden. The Winchesters didn't see the thing that Castiel reacted to, but they could see his face go white, his customary frown deepen dramatically, and his lips press together in a thin line of fury.

_Azreal._

Inside Alice's dream world, Castiel was livid.

He barely waited until he and Alice had left the bunker before he explained that her powers would only stay bound as long as she remained separated from her body. He then proceeded to somehow use his angel mojo to extend the handcuffs keeping her hands together to her feet, hog-tying her securely in the foyer of her dorm.

"I'm sorry, Alice. But I cannot let the Winchesters continue to investigate," Castiel explained succinctly, his clipped tone covering concern.

Alice could easily understand his motives; whatever that _thing_ was, it wasn't something the boys could just _handle_. But that didn't mean she wasn't pissed. "Castiel! You get your feathery ass back here, you whiny little bitch!"

But he'd flown the coop and Alice's only companion was the statue in the fountain. For a moment, she couldn't think of what to do. She couldn't wriggle free of Castiel's bindings. She couldn't call for help because no one could hear her, at least they hadn't when she'd shouted a greeting to her RA as they'd passed on the way down to the bunker. And then she remembered Tessa. A reaper would be able to hear her anywhere, she hoped.

While Alice sat trying to figure out what to do and then launched into calling for a grim reaper, Sam and Dean were fretting in the motel room. The excursion Castiel had gone on with Alice took just less than 20 minutes. He flew back to his body, shaking with the name of the monster beneath the earth on his tongue.

"Stay with her."

He'd given his order and zapped off within a second.

Alice, meanwhile, was still out cold. There was nothing that they could do about it, and Castiel wouldn't answer them.

Dean called Bobby.

"You ever heard of a thing called 'Azreal'?"

"Hello to you too," Bobby sniped. "Should I know an Azreal?"

"Cas just flew off somewhere, pissed, and all he said about it was Azreal," Dean huffed.

Bobby started thinking over his recent research, but stopped dead, asking, "Wait, he _flew_ off? I thought you had that Alice girl with you. He shouldn't be able to zap out of there at all."

"I know, but he bound Alice's power or something and now she's on the floor and Cas is gone, and there's some big-ass mook on the loose," Dean ranted.

"Do you ever shut up? Listen, I think I've got something for you," Bobby shouted. "I've got nothing on Azreal specifically, but that sounds like an angel name to me. He could be one of the original Fallen, Lucifer wasn't the only angel cast out of Heaven back in the day. And the Fallen are on the list of things that could mess with an angel's power with Alice around, so I'm thinkin' it's a pretty safe bet."

"Yeah, and how you we kill 'em?"

"I've got a few leads, now that I know what I'm lookin' for. Call back in an hour or so," Bobby said, the sounds of paper shifting around already filtering through to Dean.

Hanging up, Dean turned back to Sam. "Any change?"

"Nope, nada. She's still breathing fine, but she won't wake up, and I'm afraid to try anything like breaking the circle," Sam informed.

"Yeah, I know what you mean. Dammit, Cas! Where are you?"

"Castiel, Castiel, Castiel; what has that little rebel done now?"

Wheeling on the voice as it appeared behind them at the motel room's door, Sam and Dean gaped to find it swinging open to reveal a portly old woman, very neatly dressed, with a sinister over-friendly smile. She remained outside, unable to step past Castiel's warding.

"And who the Hell are you?"

"Watch your tongue, young man," the woman chastised smartly, eyeing Dean like he was an unruly grandchild. "My name is Muriel. I'm here for Alice."

"You can't have her," Sam said firmly, coming to stand by his brother, between the angel and Alice. They weren't going to let anyone else be abused by the angels on their account.

And then Alice woke up.

"Castiel's in trouble."

"What? Where?" Dean demanded, his focus entirely shifted.

"He's under Ball Circle. With Azreal," Alice said, pulling herself dizzily to her feet with Sam's help. "Come on, we have to hurry. I think he's going to try something stupid."

Dean hurried to the duffel bag, grabbing every weapon he could carry as Sam decided that Alice shouldn't walk on her own and solved the problem by simply picking her up. She didn't protest. She was perfectly capable of walking on her own, but still, this was a Winchester they were talking about here.

"What about that Muriel bitch?"

"It's fine, Dean, she can't touch me. She doesn't have the juice for it," Alice replied, puffing up a bit with the realization that she had power enough to put and angel on its toes.

Sam was always the pragmatic one, "What about us?"

"The closer she is to me the weaker she is, according to Tessa, and that means she's basically human right now," Alice explained. The reaper had been very helpful, there was a reason Alice had always liked her character in the books. "Come on, let's go."

The brothers brushed past the grounded angel without a second thought, Tessa had never let them down before. Besides, if Cas was in trouble, getting to him was top priority. It meant that as Dean's phone rang on their cross-campus trek, he picked it up on the fly.

Castiel meanwhile, had flown straight back to the bunker after he'd returned to his body. Azreal was a threat that needed to be dealt with immediately. At the top of the last stage of stairs, Castiel pulled his angel blade into existence, letting it stay tucked inside his sleeve with just the tip sliding down to his fingers.

Taking the last steps into the room coated with demon wards, devil's traps, and boarded with a ring of holy fire, Castiel said, "Hello, Azreal."

At the very center of the configuration was an upright cross, to which the pathetically draped figure of a vaguely humanoid beast was chained. Skin that was black with burns, charred wings missing feathers, fangs and a contorted facial and body structure like a gargoyle; the thing that had once been among God's most beautiful and vain creatures was now spitting black bile at the lines of the cage he was literally rotting away in.

"Good to see you again, Castiel," Azreal hissed, lifting his head up from where it hung against his chest and then letting it loll across his shoulder to look at Castiel. "I was wondering if I would ever see the little seraph that never quite rebelled, but never quite had Faith."

Azreal's fists unballed and his claws tapped against the restraints. A wave of violent energy rippled through the room. It was power that his bindings should have contained.

"Felt that, right? All that power from little ol' me, and all tied up like this too," Azreal taunted. "I'm getting out of here, Castiel. And you're not strong enough to stop me."

Castiel spotted the chink in the armor, as Dean would say. The floor where some key lines of the entrapments crossed had been shattered under severe pressure; the kind only garnered from earthquakes, earthquakes such as the one that occurred immediately after Alice's arrival. That what when the trouble started; and Castiel knew that it wouldn't stop until Azreal was dead.

"You know, before that little Messiah got here, I could do a little here and there," Azreal confessed. "Make one of the whiny brats upstairs fail a test, some days I could only get people to trip. But now . . . now, I do some _real_ damage, wake up all the little nasties around here by just tapping into _her_."

"It's over now Azreal," Castiel said, whipping his hand around and flinging the angel blade at the Fallen.

It landed squarely in his chest, embedding itself into Azreal's heart.

A moment passed, but Azreal's wings hardly flared. A shiver ran through him, but he didn't die. He laughed.

"I'm not an angel anymore, Castiel," he yelled, a strangled half laugh escaping with his words. "Your little sword of Heaven can't kill me now, only someone with _twice_ the power of an _arch_angel has a hope of getting rid of me!"

"Is that so? Well, ugly, we might just be able to arrange that for you."

Dean's voice came from behind Castiel, his impetuous bravado making the angel unsure whether he wanted to grin or bang the mortal's head into a wall.

"Dean, you were supposed to stay with Alice," Castiel reprimanded, unable to resist turning his head over his shoulder to stare the Hunter down.

Cheeky smile plastered on, Dean replied, "Yeah, that's why we brought her with us."

"Hiya, Cas!"

"Alice!"

The Fallen and Castiel both said her name, with very different tones of voice. Castiel was halfway between angry and terrified. Azreal was delighted.

Another thick ripple of power emanated from Azreal.

"No!" Castiel shouted, and tried to block the attack Azreal was making on the well of power that had walked into his midst.

Alice giggled in the creepy fangirlly way that made Dean shiver, even as this time he wasn't the one it was aimed at. "Oh, Cas, you're such a sweetie. I'm fine."

"_How_?"

Azreal was horrified. "How can you stand there, right there, and then not let me _in_?"

"Actually about that, I'm really pissed at you. This thing _hurt_," Alice pouted, pulling down her v-neck just low enough to expose the not-quite-healing scratch marks of a scar-sigil. "Iron-clad protection against any and all idiots that wanna ride around in my bubble," Alice explained. "Bobby found it in one of his old books. Supposedly, it's the shorthand of God himself, footnote of the Plan to make an angel from the ether. I gotta a little grim reaper to confirm that it's a tried and true hands-off enforcer."

"_What_?" Azreal hissed.

"Yup, now if I want a little interaction with mojo of any sort, I need physical contact and a blood sacrifice," Alice mentioned chipperly.

Sam jumped in here, unable to resist the allure of spouting off the trump card that was information, "And now, it's all very focused. You see, before, when someone tapped into Alice's power, it just sorta did stuff, but now . . . now it accomplishes very specific tasks, and only ones that Alice approves of; like, vaporizing a Fallen, for example."

Castiel understood it very quickly. He looked to Dean for confirmation briefly before slicing into his skin and drawing a connective sigil onto Alice's outstretched hand. "Have at it, Angelcakes," Alice said with a smirk.

Her grin all but vanished when Castiel began to draw on her untapped power. It hurt like bitch, like a dozen paper-cuts all attacking random bits of her and digging in deep. At the same time, it was extremely satisfying to watch Azreal sizzle away into an ashy mass of goo and feathers. That mass was quickly salted and covered in tiki-torch oil, then lit up purple as a bunker bonfire. Alice panted as her knees gave out and she had to rely on one of the Winchesters to keep her from falling. This time it was Dean, he was closer and he didn't have any imminent doom to distract him.

When Castiel started forward unsteadily though, Dean supported both him and Alice long enough for Sam to come over and take Alice off his hands. Then, he dragged one of Castiel's arms over his shoulder without the angel's consent, and didn't allow him to protest before he was following Sam and Alice out of the bunker.

Castiel used his angel mojo, the little that was left in his batteries at the moment, to seal the bunker's doors so that no hapless college explorer could find their way in. He was exhausted and so was Alice, so Alice directed the Winchesters to the closest place they had available to recuperate, her dorm.

The moment they were at the door, Alice's friends were a chaotic jumble of cooing over Alice's injuries and squealing over her stories. At the same time they chastised her about not taking her phone and there was somesuch hubbub of a war between green and purple, but Castiel was too out of it to notice, and the Winchesters were to sane to pretend to understand.

With Alice settled in her bed, and Castiel in her ever-absent roommate's, the one called Miae was the first to ask coherent questions about what had happened. Alice fell asleep not five minutes into the retelling, and Winnie set about braiding her hair in crazy arrays for lack of finding laces on her shoes. The Winchesters ignored her. They also ignored the Sam that was perched on the edge of Alice's bed, the one that was giving _Dean's_ Sam a creepy stare that was probably meant to be seductive.

"Excuse me," the politely clipped tone from the doorway only made it over the rabble after several minutes of sorting out. Sam and Dean turned around to face Muriel, the angel they'd encountered at the motel. Only in this room they didn't have any angel proofing to keep her out and she stepped inside without hesitation.

"I'm here for the Messiah."

"Excuse me? _Messiah?_" Dean asked, taking a threatening step towards the round old lady. Behind him Miae and Julie and Winnie were whispering something about an Umbridge, a Delores Umbridge, with cats and pink and Dean just tried to block it all out and focus on the angel at hand.

"The kind of power contained within that girl cannot be allowed to run amok on earth," Muriel explained primly.

"Muriel," Castiel's voice rasped as he roused into semi-consciousness through sheer will.

"It's okay, Cas, we can handle this old bag of bones," Dean called, crossing his arms loosely over his chest. His posture was relaxed, but it was also ready in case the angel wearing the meat-suit of the crazy-cat-lady thought to try anything. Castiel's angel blade was on Alice's desk, just within reach if Dean needed to attack.

"Did Zachariah send you?"

"What do you think, Castiel? He sent _someone_, I volunteered," Muriel replied.

Castiel pushed himself unsteadily into a sitting position. "You shouldn't have come here."

"I'll take _care_ of her, Castiel. You know I will; I took care of you often enough, didn't I? Every time you got in trouble?"

"Zachariah will abuse his position, as he has already. He wants to exploit the Messiah's power to take away the humans' Gift of Free Will," Castiel pleaded. It was strange for Sam and Dean to see him so diplomatic, so eager to convince rather than kill.

Dean interrupted the moment, "Woah, hang on, can we get back to the part where Alice is the _Messiah_?"

"Yeah, I thought she was a Pillar of the Earth or something," Sam added.

"She is. She is the inert nexus of the Divine Plan, and because of that she may also be the next Holy Child meant to enact and impart God's teachings," Castiel explained.

Dean was wholly unsatisfied. "Wait, _might_? You mean you don't know?"

"All humans are the sons and daughters of God," Muriel testified. "It's explained most clearly in the Gospel of Thomas; you are all manifestations of the Divine, and that means that any one of you has the potential to lead the rest of humanity into the Goodness of Faith."

"So why Alice?" Sam asked.

"Pillars are typically more likely to be able to garner a following, as things _happen_ around them," Muriel said. "Things that need to be made sense of; and they're typically people that are good at making sense of chaos. At this time there are only half a dozen Pillars on the planet, and of them Alice is the most successful."

"Successful how?" Dean demanded, glancing down at her sleeping figure. She was the achingly familiar too-pale that Jo had been after she'd been attacked by the Hell Hound.

Muriel sighed, exasperated with the limitations of the human animal. "She hasn't gone crazy for one thing. And she's begun to develop her Apostles, for another."

At Muriel's words, Sam and Dean looked behind them at Alice's friends. "She's still missing a few though," Muriel added, looking the group over.

It took Dean a few seconds, simply because it was too strange, but then he saw clearly that none of Alice's friends were moving. Not at all, they weren't even breathing. "What the _hell_ did you do?" he demanded.

"I didn't do anything," Muriel replied, her lips pursed in an indignant frown.

"Cas?"

"This isn't my doing."

"Then what's going on?" Dean's tone was demanding, but anyone could have seen through the male posturing to the fact that Dean was freaked out. His hand wrapped around the hilt of Castiel's angel blade, wary of what might be making an appearance.

A cold hand materialized on top of his. "It's okay, Dean," Tessa said softly, appearing at Dean's side. Sam jumped at her sudden presence. He's only just gotten slightly used to Castiel's random and abrupt arrivals, dealing with Tessa's hadn't quite sunk in yet.

"What's okay?" Gesturing vaguely to the group of girls by the window, Sam wondered, "Who did that? And what for?"

"Micah."

At Castiel's word, Sam and Dean spun around again to see that a new figure had joined them inside Alice's dorm room. He was a large man to say the least, almost as enormous as Sam; larger even when accounting for Sam's relatively muscled figure in relation to the slim shape of the new arrival in the room.

"Hello Castiel, Muriel."

"Who the Hell are you?"

"Ah, Dean Winchester, the Righteous Man." The newcomer said instead of answering. He smiled slightly as he looked Dean over appraisingly. "I've been watching you for a long time."

"You know me, always happy to put out for angel pay-per-view."

"Dean, I mean you no harm, nor your brother; nor anyone in this room," Micah promised softly, his voice hinting at deep amusement.

"Then can you explain something for me?" Alice asked, groggy but still moving about much more actively than her friends. "How the hell are you all fitting inside this room? It's only 11' by 17", and that's when it's empty. With the beds and the desks and the closets . . ."

Muriel laughed brightly. "Don't you worry about it, dearie. It's just a little angel trick."

Before Alice could ask another question, Castiel jumped in, "Micah, why are you here? That vessel cannot possibly contain you for long."

"No, but it can for long enough, Castiel. I will return him to his life undamaged," Micah promised. "I'm here about the Messiah candidate. She needs to be protected." At Muriel's pointed look towards Castiel, Micah added, "From Zachariah, above all, at the moment."

Muriel deflated. Micah continued, "The Pillars are completely neutral, they are not to be interfered with under _any_ circumstances."

"Then why are you here?"

"Do not worry Alice, I'm not here for them either," Micah soothed. Something about the calm he emanated managed to seep into Alice, which allowed her to hear his next suggestion without freaking out, "I'm here to assign you a guardian, because you do need to be protected but in Heaven's current state, you cannot be taken there."

He paused a moment, looking behind the frozen group of Alice's friends as yet another new figure came suddenly into being. There were now thirteen people standing comfortably in a room designed to be cramped living for two. That, of all the possible options, was what bothered Alice most about the situation.

"You're late, Nathaniel."

"I had trouble with her warding."

Alice puzzled, "But I thought I only grounded angels because Azreal was tied up and I just leveled the playing field."

"That is indeed why you grounded Castiel totally, but your presence still disturbs the natural order," Micah explained patiently. "Navigating with, what do you call them, 'drunk goggles', is a similar experience to trying to find you directly."

Muriel was appalled, for multiple reasons. "You're letting her _stay_ here? Lucifer will only exploit her chaotic tendencies! Leaving her here will be far worse than anything Zachariah will do, and we cannot spare the Seraph!" She huffed primly, fluffing up like a discombobulated bird. "A _Seraph_ in the place of a mere guardian angel! It's preposterous."

"It's part of the Plan."

The angels didn't say anything, simply responding to Micah's candid reference to his unique place in knowing the mind and intentions of God. Sam too was silent in thought, wondering at the sudden hope springing in his chest. If God did have a Plan, it had sucked so far, but maybe, just _maybe_, there was the promise of a happy ending that wasn't what the majority of Host of Heaven had in mind.

Dean was not lost in the potential majesty. "Plan? What _plan?_ We threw that book out, if you haven't heard. We're not going to play along with you damn angels. This apocalypse? It's gonna end, no prize-fight, no paradise, nada."

"You've done exactly what you were meant to do, and you will continue to enact the Plan as you have," Micah replied. "God's Plan has never been disclosed fully, not to the angels, not to mortals, not even to me. God only intervenes when it's his place to do so, when the Plan itself is in jeopardy."

"Yeah? So why did Jo have to die? Why did Pamela, or Ash, or _anyone_ have to die?"

"I don't know. I don't know the _why_ for many things that happen, I just know that _nothing_ happens unless God has designed for it to happen," Micah confessed. "We angels are as in the dark as anyone. You should listen to the little Messiah. I know what she said to you, to both of you Winchesters, and even to Castiel. She told you all more than just what you needed to hear; and it was more than just 'Lit Major BS', Alice. There was Truth in it," Micah said.

He let his words sink in for a few moments. Then he looked to Muriel. "Shall we be going then?" He asked, the boom in his deep voice authoritative now rather than soothing. The humans in the room shivered with the hint of Heavenly power he contained.

"Wait, that's it?" Sam demanded. He was always one to poke a gift horse.

This time Alice had to agree. "Isn't that kind of anticlimactic?"

Dean wanted to kill them both.

Micah smiled. "Would you like to battle it out? I think that, for sake of your security deposit, it would best to postpone our final showdown for the time being."

Alice nodded slowly, suddenly thinking that she'd like to postpone a showdown with Micah until the end of time or after. Even if it would have made for a better ending to this crazy chapter in her biography, she definitely didn't want it to be the ending _of_ her biography.

Keeping his mouth shut about it, Sam thought that this was all way too easy. Things like this just didn't happen to them, _ever._

"This isn't your story, Sam," Micah mentioned, making Sam jump. "Things like this happen to Alice all the time, just not _quite_ of this magnitude." The angel was smiling again, rather fond of the sheer _humanity_ of God's greatest creations. They were quite the multifaceted creatures, and their destiny was more grand than they could possibly imagine.

Then Micah turned serious again. "Now, I must return my vessel quickly, unless you would be okay with leaving him ruined, so Nathaniel will answer the rest of your questions. Farewell, your parts in this play are truly little ones, even as they are vitally important. Muriel."

They were gone in the next instant.

"Well, that was different," Sam muttered.

The surprised shrieks of Alice's friends brought them back to the moment.

Winnie was the most interesting to watch react. After the initial surprise of finding Nathaniel standing in their midst, Winnie spotted that his vessel's tie was a bright purple satin, and immediately stretched out a hand to poke at it. When she didn't spontaneously combust, she poked it again. Then she squealed, bounced to Julie's side, and made _her_ poke the tie by forcefully grabbing her arm.

Nathaniel looked as if he was about to smite them all right then and there.

"See, see, see! Purple is the best color ever!"

Julie rolled her eyes and squeaked, "Green!"

Winnie shook her head back and forth, her whole frame shaking with energy. "But _angels _wear purple!"

Miae giggled and jumped in with, "But angel _eyes_ are green! Lookie!"

Reluctantly, Winnie did as she was told. It was true; Nathaniel had bright green eyes, almost unnaturally bright. Dean was reminded of how Castiel's eyes had that energy in them, making the blue hue practically electric.

He far preferred to think of Cas than of the fact that Winnie was having some sort of seizure and in the midst of her fit she was mewling unintelligibly that it's not fair because eyes _can't_ be purple, so they shouldn't count. He pushed all awareness of Winnie and Miae away as they began to paw at each other.

Looking at the unfortunate angel in the midst of their craziness for a moment, Dean turned back to his own angelic friend. "Come on, Cas. What the hell was that?"

"It seems as though we have observed God's intervention," Castiel said, his mouth a thin line that bordered fury.

A swish of wind and invisible feathers and Cas was gone.

Dean swore.

Alice got his attention. "There's a river with a very beautiful bridge vista a mile and a half from here, I guarantee that's where he went."

"Where."

"Out the dorm doors turn right, walk till you hit Williams Street, turn left and walk until you find your angel," Alice directed with a sigh. It was nice to see how dedicated Dean was to keeping his little family together, but it was heart breaking to see how much was trying to tear them apart.

Dean blew out of the room without an instant's hesitation. Alice looked sympathetically to Sam, who was too distracted by his own thoughts to notice. The look on Castiel's face when he gave up his search for God, the look on Dean's when he'd thrown away the amulet; they'd both given up after that, but now . . . now they were just pissed. It wasn't so much sadness as it was anger, and Sam's face reflected all of it.

No one mentioned it. Instead they let him have as much privacy in his thoughts as a room full of fangirls could, keeping their concern and aesthetic appreciation of him limited to sly glances every now and then as Hannah stood in front of Nathaniel and pointedly looked him over. "So, who are you exactly?"

"Nathaniel, and I'm only here for the Messiah's sake."

"Okay, if you want to stick around and not be blasted to the ends of the universe, you're going to stop calling me that," Alice said sardonically. "It's fucking creepy."

Nathaniel gave her a bored look.

"If you don't need me, I'll be leaving, then," he informed, his tone just short of snippy.

"Hold on there, sparky, I've still got questions."

"Then ask them."

"Do you come when called?"

"I am not a dog."

"Then how are you supposed to know if I need you?"

"I can always hear you, if you pray to me."

"Always?"

"Always."

Alice grinned. "I guess you can go then, I'm exhausted."

In the next second, he was gone. Brittany looked sideways at her friend, "You just let him leave like that?"

"If can't just tune me out, I can be awfully annoying if he doesn't play the good little puppy," Alice replied. "He'll come when we call him back."

The Lady Sam arched an eyebrow, "And when would that be, Missy Messiah?"

"Don't call me that, it's seriously creeptastic. And I dunno, but right now, I really need a nap," Alice replied, stretching out for a moment and then curling up under the covers. She fully intended to ignore her friends until they were quiet enough for her to go to sleep.

Miae chirped, "But what about dinner!"

Julie and Winnie promptly jumped on top of Alice poking at her, looking for a ticklish spot, as Hannah asked, "What have you eaten today?"

Alice had to think seriously about the question. "Um, what exactly counts as 'today'?"

Everyone sighed, except the hunter-Sam who's attention was caught by the synchronized sound. Hannah declared, "Alright, that's it. You need to eat something."

Brittany suggested, "Wanna hit the Underground?"

"Well, it's the only place open to blow off some UMW Monopoly money, and since I'm not getting a nap until these idiots think I'm fed, I suppose we could swing that," Alice sighed. "You can come, too, Sam."

Hannah jumped on the suggestion, "Yeah, Sam, tag along with us."

She was _not_ Becky. She was a Sam-girl and in her internal being she was Becky, sort of, but she could keep it completely together. Mostly.

Sam sighed, recognizing the signals of a fangirl, but also those of a girl in total control of herself, and agreed. He hadn't eaten any real food in a while, and grabbing something for Dean to snack on later would be a good plan.


	7. Keep Calm & Carry On My Wayward Son

The Undergound was a hipster fake-coffee-joint in the dead center of campus, serving sandwiches, salads, soups, and various sweets and salty snacks. When Sam noticed that it was owned by an outside company, by _Woodstock_ for heaven's sake, he was glad Dean wasn't here with him. He'd rampage at the blaspheme of the music world.

"I know, it pains my soul too, but it's the only place with pita chips in a twenty mile radius," Alice commented as the group approached the order counter. At four in the afternoon, the place was deserted. It was Alice's preferred time to be in any of the dining establishments on campus. Fridays were usually her day in Seacobeck Hall, but there was a barbeque or something going on for the staff, so the dining hall was closed to the students.

Alice let Brittany and the Lady Sam order before her. She picked out what she wanted and handed over her student ID card. "Take care of these guys for me, okay Marge? I've got enough meals or Flex to cover whatever they want, so just credit me for it."

"Of course, dearie! It's good to see you with company for once!"

"Thanks, Marge, you're a doll!"

Alice blew her a kiss, knowing the old woman loved her old fashioned compliments, and then she slid into the horseshoe booth that Brittany and Sam had picked out. Within twenty minutes the rest of her friends, and Sam Winchester, had surrounded the table and an impressive spread of mostly edible food was set before them.

The pita chips were stale, rock hard. It was unfortunate, but the odds of getting fresh pita were so low that when it happened, it was actually scary. The cure was to let the stale clump of bread soak in the French onion soup for a few minutes before trying to break it into pieces to share with the people who didn't take the chance and were willing to trade you brownie or cookie bites. It was only as she was breaking up the last of the rock hard bread ball that she realized she was breaking bread with her closest friends on the eve of a great revelation.

"Dude, this had better not be my Last Supper," Alice said, popping a bite of soup-soaked bread into her mouth. "How depressing would it be to have _this_ be the last meal you ever eat?"

"Clearly you're not allowed to kiss Sam tonight," Brittany laughed.

Hannah agreed. "And if you do die, I'm carving that on your tombstone."

Looking to Miae and Winnie, Alice said with mock seriousness, "I'm commissioning you guys to commemorate this moment in exquisite artistic detail."

Both of them nodded and then Winnie made a peace-sign with her fingers, the bracelets on her wrist jingling with an echo of her excitement. Alice responded by grinning and drawing a vaguely box-shaped figure in the air. Sam pretended he knew what any of it meant as the rest of the girls laughed.

By the time Alice friends had pushed her full of food to suit Hannah's standards, she was allowed to head back to her dorm, take a shower, and finally get some rest. The girls came back to the dorm with her, after giving Sam the message that they could figure out how to take care of the rest of the mooks around Fredericksburg in the morning. It had the subtext that if the Winchesters tried to figure it out themselves and then leave without saying goodbye, the girls could and certainly would hunt them down for a proper farewell.

If Sam hadn't been currently pissed beyond words at the ultimate heavenly power, he would have said that their sincerity to that end had put the fear of God in him. On his way back to the motel, he called Bobby to let him know that his idea to destroy Azreal had worked. When he told the old hunter about the visit from Micah, and the revelation that Alice was a shoe-in for the next Messiah, he didn't believe Sam's words the first time through the story.

There was only so much he could take in at once.

"How's Dean doing?"

"I dunno," Sam replied. "Cas took off a few hours ago, and Dean went out after him. The whole God does exist and can directly intercede thing has really gotten to them."

"You don't think . . ."

"No, he's not gonna say yes," Sam said with confidence, the hard earned, regretful certainty of the brother that had already seen Dean cross that line and come back.

Bobby made a strangled noise, one that could have been agreement or dissention, or even an even mix of both. "An' how're you holdin' up?"

"I'm doin' alright, Bobby," Sam said, more honest about it than he'd been in a long while.

"And how about the rest of the mooks in that freaky town?"

"We're still working on that," Sam confessed.

Bobby sighed. "Well work fast, Azreal might've been why all that crap was so damn evil, but don't forget that Alice is what kick-started it all."

"We know, Bobby, we're taking care of it all in the morning, probably; if Dean can get Cas over this . . . whatever this is, it'll be finished before lunch," Sam promised.

"It'd better be," Bobby huffed affectionately. "I think I might have something for you boys to sniff out in Indiana so the faster you can get outta Fredericksburg, the better."

Sam grinned. "Bobby, you've always got some new trail for us."

"There's always somethin' new to hunt," Bobby growled.

"I know, Bobby," Sam replied. It was nice to think that there was something _normal_ mixed up in all of this crazy apocalypse crap. "We're on it."

Sam reached the motel room and hung up with Bobby. He threw Dean's doggy bag on the table and contemplated calling him. Deciding against it, Sam took his shower and tried to relax. It wasn't possible to actually relax, but considering everything, this was the closest he'd come to genuine calm in a long while. He even contemplated going to a bar and even picking up some company, but he tossed the idea out quickly in favor of turning on the news and flipping open his laptop to look up whatever scent Bobby had caught of Lucifer's activity in Indiana. Tourists seemed to be dropping off the radar at random, and the violent weather hitting the area reeked of Lucifer's involvement.

It wasn't until very late that night when Dean slipped into the motel room, expecting his little brother to be asleep. He'd managed to talk Cas back to their cause and the angel had dropped on via his two-fingers-of-death. He would spend the night in Heaven, talking to his contacts about what Micah's intervention meant to Team Free Will's cause.

"I dunno, man," Dean said abruptly, coming out of the shower and flopping onto his bed. "This whole Hunt just doesn't make sense."

"You're tellin' me," Sam sighed.

"I just don't get it, things used to be so simple, you know? A man could know what he was getting in bed with."

Sam watched as Dean punched his pillow, dealing out more punishment than was strictly necessary to make it comfortable. "Bobby says he's got somethin' for us in Indiana. Looks pretty run of the mill for the Apocalypse."

Dean guffawed harshly. "Yeah, imagine that, 'run of the mill' for the end of the world. Dude, we are so screwed." Dean closed his eyes and crossed his arms over his chest, settling in for the night. "If you say things could be worse, I _will_ kill you, Sammy."

"No, you're right," Sam said, grinning at Dean's superstitions. "We are definitely screwed." He turned off the light and the television to let his brother get a better night's sleep, but Sam stayed up going over things on his laptop, desperate to think of _something_ else, something _more_, that could help them avert the Apocalypse without the big prize-fight.

He didn't get anywhere.

Giving up for the night, Sam decided all he could do was try again tomorrow. The important thing, he supposed, was that he did.

Bright and early the next morning, Sam got a call from Hannah. "We're working on getting Alice out of bed, you guys gonna be ready to figure this ghost problem out in half an hour? Meet at Hyperion?"

"Yeah, Hannah, sounds good," Sam replied, listening through the phone to Julie's voice signing something in a language he couldn't hope to decode.

The Winchesters were ready with salt guns and an iron poker for each of them in a duffle in ten minutes. They were almost late as Dean guided his baby through the streets filled with drivers so god awful Dean was surprised that the town didn't have a reality show called 'Survival of the Paint-jobs'. Having finally gotten the Impala safely parked behind the coffee house, Sam and Dean went inside and looked around as they ordered.

They spotted Alice, looking rather frazzled for reason of it being 7am on a Saturday.

The Winchesters had to grin at her wet-kitten expression as she nursed a steaming two-shot mocha. As they came to sit at the table the girls had claimed, Alice stuck her tongue out at her friends. Then turning to Dean she asked, "So, you gonna call your angel, or what?"

"I'll call mine if you call yours," Dean challenged.

"Fine," Alice returned with a grin.

They each waited a few seconds, staring the other down, before calling their associated angels perfectly in sync. Castiel and Nathaniel fluttered in abruptly, appearing so suddenly in the crowded coffee shop that none of the patrons gave them a second glance. The angels acknowledged each other frostily.

"Hey, mister heavenly guide, guardian, whatever," Alice said, trying to pull Nathaniel's attention away from Castiel. "How do we get rid of Mr. Bomb Shelter Ghost?"

Nathaniel's cool green eyes turned to Alice, a bored and intensely appraising glance. Castiel answered for him. "We should return to the scene of the murders."

"And then what about the rest of the town," Alice wondered, "How're you going to cleanse the whole area?"

Castiel looked guilty for a moment. It was an adorably human hesitation. "Before we bound your influence, I had believed that I could tap into that energy."

"But now you need the whole consent thing," Alice said, her mind flicking back to the awful sensation of the paper cuts she'd experienced when Castiel had destroyed Azreal. This would probably take much more power. "Great, that's just fabulous."

Helplessly looking at Dean, Castiel tried to understand her tone in terms of her words. He'd gotten used to Dean's use of 'awesome' in decidedly non-awesome situations, but Dean was the only human he'd encountered that did so. The angel decided not to comment.

Nathaniel on the other hand replied snidely, "Oh, please. You're pathetic, even for a human. If you're going to be so soft, how in Heaven's name am I supposed to manage you?"

Alice looked sideways at Hannah for a split second before popping the lid off her mocha and throwing it wholesale over Nathaniel. Hannah grinned and passed Alice the mocha she'd gotten, it was well worth sharing her drink to see the expression on Nathaniel's face as he bamf-ed himself back to perfect condition.

"I don't need managing, thank you very much. I need caffeine," Alice chirped cattily. Then she sighed and looked back to Castiel, "So how're we gonna do this?"

Castiel looked to the Winchesters and zapped them away before using his angel mojo on Alice and disappearing with Nathaniel. Still in the coffee shop, Alice's friends let out a collective sigh. Hannah swore and began discussing the possibilities of what the others were up to with Brittany. Julie pouted, saying, "But I brought Twizzlers for them."

Miae patted Julie on the head, cooing, "They'll be back!"

Meanwhile, the Winchesters, Alice, and a pair of angels popped up in the forgotten atomic bomb shelter hidden away beneath the Fredericksburg Museum. Sam and Dean remained standing only because they'd gotten used to Castiel mojo-ing them all over the place unexpectedly. Alice on the other hand decided that she quite enjoyed whatever it was that the angels did to get around; it wasn't quite flying, but it was exhilarating and efficient and best of all, it didn't mess up her hair.

Nathaniel was the first to speak, "Castiel! You cannot simply take the _Messiah_ wherever you please! Particularly not directly into danger!"

"No one can take _Alice_ anywhere she does not wish to go, Nathaniel," Castiel replied.

"She's not involved in your little insurrection, she ought to be left out of it."

"Um guys? _Ghost,_" Alice's announcement tore the Winchester's attention away from the arguing angels. She had her violin case with her, covered in salt-soaked fabric with pure iron detailing, and it served to slash through the aggressive and clearly vengeful spirit of good old Jackson Goode.

Castiel dispelled him for good with a few words of Enochian and the firm press of a mojo-bright handprint burned into the concrete wall.

Hands balling into fists at his side, Nathaniel mentioned, "This is entirely pointless. No matter how pure you make this town, the moment she leaves, more evil things are going to pop up around her."

"But this way it'll be clam enough around here for me to finish up college," Alice countered. "Besides, I need some time to suss out a Hunter team that can utilize my little talent."

Nathaniel turned his not-quite-glare on Alice. "You can't _control_ this, it's not a tool you can use to your own ends."

"Humans are very clever when it comes to tools," Alice replied.

She tried to stare the angel down, but even the flightiest of angels had more patience than a teenage girl. Pouting, because cuteness was a weapon too and she couldn't reach her shotgun, Alice leveled, "Fine. If you're not going to be helpful, go away."

"I'm not leaving the Messiah with a fallen angel, let alone one in league with the _Winchesters_," Nathaniel retorted.

"Then go stand in a corner or something, your linear thinking is killing my zen," Alice said, shooing him off before turning to Castiel. "So, is there any way we can do this without the whole attack-of-the-invisible-paper-monsters thing?"

"Perhaps; that is why I've enlisted Sam and Dean," Castiel explained.

"And exactly are _we_ gonna do?" Dean asked. He'd been wondering why Castiel had bamf-ed them along for the ride, since they hadn't been of any use at all in the brief tussle with Goode. But Cas wouldn't keep them jumping through hoops unless they could be useful.

Looking between the brothers, Castiel answered, "Exactly what you did the first time we fiddled with binding Alice's influence." A small knife materialized in Castiel's hand. He dragged it swiftly across the skin on Dean's arm and used the beads of blood that bubbled out to draw an Enochian sigil on Alice's palm.

"Jesus _Christ_, Cas," Dean shouted. "Give a guy some warning, will you?"

"I'm sorry, Dean. I thought I had made myself clear. Sam?"

Sam held out his arm and winced as the blade slid through the top layers of his skin. Castiel's blood marked the third and final sigil, drawn onto Alice's forehead. The fact that having a fallen angel finger-painting on her with fresh blood didn't bother her briefly unnerved Alice, and the so did fact that most of her mind was more concerned with the affect angel blood seeping into the pores on her forehead would have on the development of wrinkles. She pushed the feelings aside though, as thinking about it would only make her all the more bothered.

"If, rather than purging the entire town in one go, we create a Devil's Trap of sorts out of an array of smaller cleansings, it should ensure that minimal strain is exerted on Alice," Castiel explained. "That, combined with her connections to you two ought to make the experience nearly painless and entirely bearable."

Dean shrugged. "If you say so, Cas."

He grabbed Alice's hand and Sam did the same adding, "We're a little out of our depth here, Cas, so whatever you think will work."

"It is not a guaranteed cure," Castiel explained. "Alice will have to stay in contact with Bobby, and whatever contacts of his pass through here, to ensure her safety."

"I can probably do that," Alice replied with a smile.

Castiel hesitated a moment before giving her a half-smile in return. Then he put his hand on her head and tapped into her power. It was a million times better than Alice's last experience, there was an intense tingling and a buzz of radiating energy that spread throughout her limbs. The closest it got to the paper-cuts-all-over feeling was a bit of pins and needles in her legs. Sam and Dean felt it too, but as it was able to spread out more over their larger frames, it wasn't as intense a feeling.

The Angel Air Service that Cas used to zap the human trio to the different stops on his list of micro-cleanses on Castiel's Fredericksburg Face-lift agreed with the Winchesters much less than the tingling sensation. On the bright side, they'd left grumpy old Nathaniel behind, but the brothers were standing on knees made of Jello by the end of the jump-spree.

When Cas gave the all clear before poofing away to who knew where, Dean bent over, hugging his chest to his knees. "I'm gonna be sick," he spluttered.

"Me too," Sam said, looking equally queasy, and latching onto the solid brick of Hyperion's back wall. He watched Dean waddle over to the Impala, and grinned as the car's mystical properties gave Dean his strength back.

When he was sufficiently upright, Alice asked, "Would all you-can-eat pie help make it up to you?"

Dean's attention was caught instantaneously. "Pie?"

"There's a salad bar too, Sam," Alice mentioned. "And I can get the guys to bring out pretty much anything you could possibly want. Saturday brunch is pretty much just me, typically speaking, so they'll be happy to have more people hanging around."

Sam grinned at her. Dean was already sliding into the driver's seat. "Let's get a move on! Where's this magical pie place?"

"It's on campus. Take Williams until Campus Drive, take a right and pull in to the parking lot by Seacobeck Lane," Alice instructed, settling herself into the back seat.

Sam lurched into shotgun and Dean warned, "Don't you dare throw up in my baby, Sammy. I will not hesitate to kill you."

"Jerk."

"Bitch."

The roar of the engine as Dean pressed his foot down at that moment was one of the most beautiful things Alice had ever heard. She smiled in complete contentment on the short drive to the main campus dining hall.

Amber was sitting in the entry way as always, her eyes sparkled brightly with the hint of gossip as Alice led the two extraordinarily handsome Hunters inside. As Alice waited for Amber to swipe them all in the cheeky old woman asked, "Who're your new friends, darlin'?"

"Business associates, sorta," Alice replied brightly. "And good friends besides."

"Well, your other lovelies are already inside, waitin' for you," Amber chirped, handing Alice back her entry card. This was a great week, aside from all the near-death-experiences, because her meal-plan's remainder heading into the break had been halved and she had hardly wasted any money in the purchase of the smallest available option her school provided.

Getting back to the moment, Alice led the Winchesters into the room on the left, the Washington Diner, Winchester Paradise. Cookies, cupcakes, and pies galore lined one side of a buffet and then rabbit food lined the other, everything organic and natural and ecofreaky. Stations behind the main buffet had bacon, sausage, eggs, breakfast potatoes and even biscuits and gravy. Dean had to check his heartbeat to make sure he was still living.

He briefly contemplated that it could have been on par with his memory of that one fourth of July with Sammy, out on their own with the Impala.

"Have at it guys, eat everything you want," Alice encouraged, grabbing a mug for herself off the rack and heading over to make a cup of tea.

The afternoon was spent in general conversation, light and fun, the most simple and idyllic moment of the Winchester's recent years. And the food was great; even if it was only slightly better than crap diner food, it was _free_ and it was slightly better than their average. It was a good moment, a necessary breather.

It couldn't last forever.

As evening began to make an approach, the Winchesters grew antsy. Indiana was hours away and more tourists were disappearing every night. The Apocalypse was creeping onward, and their options for averting it had long since dwindled to one. They needed to move on.

Goodbyes from Alice's friends were quick and only awkward to the barest degree as a little bit more of their collective fangirling-side slipped through their professionalism. Alice followed them outside to the Impala, and gave them each a quick hug as tight as she could make it. Sam grinned at her. "If that Danny kid ever gives you more trouble, just give us a call and we'll set him straight."

"That goes for anyone who wants to mess with you, got it?" Dean asked.

"You guys are in my speed dial," Alice replied. "Bobby too."

Ruffling her hair, Dean instructed, "Take care of yourself, okay, Thumbelina?"

"Can't promise I won't create anymore hurricanes," she countered, "But I'll try. And you two had better not do anything especially stupid!"

"We'll be fine, we're pretty good at our jobs, you know," Dean shouted, slipping into the driver's seat. "Bobby'll be in touch with you soon about that Hunter team."

Sam waved to her from shotgun as Dean flipped on the radio.

AC/DC's _Back in Black_ boomed through the early evening as Dean pulled out onto the road, the Impala's distinct shadow standing out against the purples and oranges of the sky. The boys were on their way, whatever that way was. Alice worried for them, sure that things weren't about to get any easier for them and equally positive that there was no one on earth better for the jobs they had.

Turning to head back into Seaco and to her friends, Alice whispered, "It's not a bad ending to the latest chapter of my kdrama chronicles. I think I like it."

Just before she returned to life-as-crazy-as-usual, she threw one last look over her shoulder, and sealed the movie-perfect ending in place. With her hand on the door, Alice called to the ether, "Ciao, boys. And good luck."

**_Finite_**.

* * *

**A/N:** Here's some notes on the Angels, in case you were wondering.

Azreal, angel of the Fallen, not quite demon, not nearly an angel; (god's light) angel of grief

Muriel, angel of tending, looking after, and emotions

Micah, angel incarnate of the Divine Plan (close with Joshua, much higher paygrade)

Nathaniel, angel of fire, passion, and protection

_Thank you so much for reading! I've definitely gotten enough of a response to think about putting at least one more story up here!_


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